Tag: transposons

Jumping genes!

This spring, I noticed this striped flower in a stand of feral Hesperis matronis
hesperistransposonStripey flowers! And like almost all striped flower variants, almost certainly caused by transposons, aka jumping genes.

To understand transposons, you can think of genes as instructions. So when making a flower, a plant may be following a gene that says:

MAKE PURPLE PIGMENT

And so it does, and the flower is purple.

You can think of a transposon as a gene that says:

COPY ME!… Continue reading this article “Jumping genes!”