June 2008

Kristen Stevens, an Epidemiology PhD student in her 2nd year in the Genome Sciences Training Program, is featured in the SPH Findings Magazine for Spring/Summer 2008. Read the interview with Kristen.

May 2008

John V. Moran, associate professor of human genetics at the U-M Medical School, has been appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is among 56 top scientists nationally who have been appointed as investigators.

Dr. Moran is a pioneer in understanding the biology of common repetitive DNA elements in the human genome often dismissed as "junk" DNA. He leads a group of U-M researchers who examine how these repetitive elements impact the evolution of the human genome.

Dr. Moran examines a class of "jumping genes" called LINE-1 elements, which are a perplexing class of repetitive DNA in the human genome. These repetitive elements make up roughly 17 percent of human genetic material, but once were largely ignored and disparaged as "junk". The bulk of this "junk" DNA appears to have been been carried down from our distant evolutionary past and can be considered to be molecular fossils.

Dr. Moran and his laboratory have shown that some LINE-1 elements can still jump and that their mobility can impact the human genome in a myriad of ways. The lab has developed tools from the fields of genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry to systematically study LINE-1 movement in cultured human cells.

Dr. Moran continues to study why, when and how often LINE-1 elements jump to new locations, with the long-range goal of understanding how the process has influenced the evolution of the human genome and how the mobility of LINE-1 elements can occasionally lead to genetic diseases such as Hemophilia A, colon cancer and muscular dystrophy.