Meeting report: transposable elements at the crossroads of evolution, health and disease 2023

Irina R Arkhipova; Kathleen H Burns; Katherine B Chiappinelli; Edward B Chuong; Clement Goubert; Alba Guarné; Amanda M Larracuente; E Alice Lee; Henry L Levin

doi:10.1186/s13100-023-00307-4

Meeting report: transposable elements at the crossroads of evolution, health and disease 2023

Mob DNA. 2023 Nov 27;14(1):19. doi: 10.1186/s13100-023-00307-4.

Authors

Irina R Arkhipova¹, Kathleen H Burns², Katherine B Chiappinelli³, Edward B Chuong⁴, Clement Goubert^{5

6}, Alba Guarné⁷, Amanda M Larracuente⁸, E Alice Lee⁹, Henry L Levin¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA. iarkhipova@mbl.edu.
² Department of Pathology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02215, USA.
³ Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine, The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Washington, DC, 20052, USA.
⁴ BioFrontiers Institute and Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA.
⁵ McGill Genome Centre, Department of Human Genomics, Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.
⁶ Department of Pharmacy Practice & Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA.
⁷ Department of Biochemistry and Centre de Recherche en Biologie Structurale, McGill University, Montreal, QC, H3G 0B1, Canada.
⁸ Department of Biology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA.
⁹ Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
¹⁰ Division of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, 20892, USA.

Abstract

The conference "Transposable Elements at the Crossroads of Evolution, Health and Disease" was hosted by Keystone Symposia in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, on September 3-6, 2023, and was organized by Kathleen Burns, Harmit Malik and Irina Arkhipova. The central theme of the meeting was the incredible diversity of ways in which transposable elements (TEs) interact with the host, from disrupting the existing genes and pathways to creating novel gene products and expression patterns, enhancing the repertoire of host functions, and ultimately driving host evolution. The meeting was organized into six plenary sessions and two afternoon workshops with a total of 50 invited and contributed talks, two poster sessions, and a career roundtable. The topics ranged from TE roles in normal and pathological processes to restricting and harnessing TE activity based on mechanistic insights gained from genetic, structural, and biochemical studies.

Keywords: Mobile DNA; Mobile genetic elements; Retrotransposons; Transposition; Transposons.

Abstract

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