This is a fascinating story of a gene fusion event. Last year, in a paper published in PNAS in collaboration with Richard Cordaux (now at the University of Poitiers, France) and Mark Batzer (LSU), the authors reconstructed the evolutionary history of a primate fusion gene called SETMAR. It serves as a good introduction to the kind of questions that arise from molecular genomics and the study of mobile DNA It will also provide an example of how transposons and other forms of so-called ‘junk DNA’ can, on occasions, make themselves useful in the genome. Finally this is a story that generated quite a bit of discussion on the web including theology, GM foods, and evolution.
