Vladimir Kapitonov

Vladimir Kapitonov is a Russian-American biologist and geneticist.^{[ clarification needed ]}

Research

In 2005 he and Jerzy Jurka described a new genetic element called a Polinton which is self-synthesizing in such plants and insects as entamoeba, fruit flies, and fungi. They also discovered it in various species of chicken, fish, frogs, lizards, and such underwater species as sea squirts, sea urchins and anemones. ^[1]

In October 2007 he and Jurka paired up again, this time to describe transposable element in Arabidopsis thaliana , Oryza sativa and Caenorhabditis elegans plant species which became known as Helitron which he suggests plays a major role in genomic evolution. ^[2]

In 2011 he studied a microRNA gene which was previously discovered in mice and made even further discovery that by using various bioinformatic tools to determine its intron contains the SFMBT2 gene. ^[3]

References

1. Vladimir V. Kapitonov & Jerzy Jurka (March 21, 2006). "Self-synthesizing DNA transposons in eukaryotes". PNAS . 103 (12). National Academy of Sciences: 4540–4545. Bibcode:2006PNAS..103.4540K. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0600833103 . PMC   1450207 . PMID   16537396.
2. Vladimir V. Kapitonov and Jerzy Jurka (October 2007). "Helitrons on a roll: eukaryotic rolling-circle transposons". Trends in Genetics . 23 (10): 521–9. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2007.08.004. PMID   17850916.
3. S Lehnert, Vladimir Kapitonov, Pushpike J Thilakarathne and FC Schuit (May 23, 2011). "Modeling the asymmetric evolution of a mouse and rat-specific microRNA gene cluster intron 10 of the Sfmbt2 gene". BMC Genomics . 12: 257. doi: 10.1186/1471-2164-12-257 . PMC   3212979 . PMID   21605348.