dictyNews
Electronic Edition
Volume 39, number 21
July 26, 2013

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Abstracts
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Selfish DNA: a pharmaceutical perspective

Thomas Winckler
Department of Pharmaceutical Biology, Institute of Pharmacy, 
University of Jena, Germany


Pharmazie 68: 467–473 (2013)

Almost 25 years ago, Theo Dingermann published the discovery of a 
new mobile genetic element in the unicellular microbe Dictyostelium 
discoideum in the journal Science. An interesting property of this new 
molecular parasite, the Dictyostelium Repetitive Element (DRE), was 
that all integrations were found approximately 50 base pairs (bp) 
upstream of transfer RNA (tRNA) genes in the D. discoideum genome, 
thus implying an active targeting mechanism to avoid the disruption of 
host cell genes by the retrotransposition process. Since then, the 
facultative multicellular “social amoeba” D. discoideum has become a 
popular model for analyzing complex cellular functions such as cell 
movement, chemotaxis, phagocytosis, and cell differentiation, important 
areas of biomedical research that are often hard to investigate in cells 
from “higher organisms” including humans. Therefore, progress in the 
development of methods to study Dictyostelium biology has also 
provoked research on transposable elements in this organism. Early 
work on the DRE element suggested that studying its molecular 
mechanism of site-specific integration might promote human gene 
therapy technology through the design of integrating gene transfer 
vectors with low intrinsic genotoxic potential. In this article, I will briefly 
review the original research performed on the DRE transposable 
element in the Dingermann lab and report on how the emergence of 
genomics technologies and the development of tools to analyze de 
novo retrotransposition events in D. discoideum cells will expand our 
knowledge of DRE biology in the future

Dedicated to Prof. Dr. Theo Dingermann, Frankfurt, on the occasion 
of his 65th birthday.

 
Submitted by Thomas Winckler [[log in to unmask]]
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