The biologist and geneticist, Dr. Zoltán Ivics, has been made
a group leader at the Max
Delbrück Center
for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch for a period of 5 years. He started
work at this national research laboratory in the northeast of Berlin this summer. Dr. Ivics` field of
expertise involves transposable DNA elements, transposons for short, that can
be found in the genomes of most (if not all) living organisms, from bacteria to
humans. However, they are very
rare as far as human disease is concerned, because as Dr. Ivics explained: ”In
vertebrates, most of these elements are dead remnants of once active
transposons that, after successfully colonizing the genomes of many different
species, became inactivated by mutations.”
