What do you do if a bunch of young, uninhibited, disruptive elements are rampaging around the place, messing things up and getting into places they shouldn’t be?  You toss them in the pillory, that’s what.

The eukaryotic cell has learned this lesson well, at least with respect to the genome.  There are millions of copies of subversive retrotransposons in the genome and each would jump at the chance to move around, causing trouble in the process.

So, what’s a peace-and-order loving cell to do?  Wrap them tightly around a histone, cram everything into some dark and unloved corner of the nucleus and hope they’re never heard from again.  That’s what. Now they’re stuck in the jail that is heterochromatin.

They deserved it.

But, as even Darth Vadar discovered, repressive regimes can’t last forever.  And as the cell ages its ability to keep the transposons repressed slowly fades.  Complacency?  Weariness?  It’s hard to say.  But the result is predictable: transposons hopping amok, highjacking promoters and smashing into exons until the apoptotic end arrives.

[The paper is paywalled so instead I’m linking to the news-vertorial.]

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/01/senescence