What is Sleeping Beauty and why called that?
Please read carefully:
"Members of the Tc1/ mariner superfamily of
transposable elements isolated from vertebrate
species are inactive due to the accumulation of
mutations. A representative of a subfamily of fish
elements estimated to be last active >10 million years
ago has been reconstructed, and named Sleeping
Beauty (SB). This element opened up new avenues for
studies on DNA transposition in vertebrates, and for
the development of transposon tools for genetic
manipulation in important model species and in
humans.".......
..."All of the fish elements isolated so far appear to have
undergone vertical inactivation, and accumulated several
mutations in their transposase genes. In an attempt to
derive an active Tc1-like transposon from vertebrates, we
have analyzed the salmonid subfamily of elements that
was presumed to be active more than 10-15 million years
ago, and appeared to have been able to invade different
fish genomes through horizontal transmission (Ivics et al.,
1996). We reasoned that a consensus sequence generated
from a sequence alignment of defective copies isolated
from different fish genomes would likely represent an active
archetypal sequence. We engineered this sequence to
reconstruct an active ancestral element, which was named
Sleeping Beauty (SB) (Ivics et al., 1997). The SB
transposon system consists of two main functional
components: the transposase encoded by a synthetic gene,
and a cloned, nonautonomous, salmonid-type element that"......
www.horizonpress.com/cimb/v/v6/04.pdfSkytroll