Researchers find retrotransposons cause genetic changes in brain cells over time

(Medical Xpress) -- Researchers in Scotland have discovered that retrotransposons, a type of gene that inserts itself into other parts of the human genome, are able to continue inserting copies of themselves into the genetic structure of brain cells over the course a person’s entire lifetime. The result is, as Geoffrey Faulkner and his team describe in their article published in Nature, brain cells that are genetically different from other cells in the body and even from one another.

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