YOU might expect a gerbil to end up inside a snake. But part of a snake ending up in a gerbil?
A small chunk of snake DNA has indeed turned up in wild gerbils, and it could one day show up in a host of other species too. Known as a “short interspersed element” (SINE), it belongs to a class of non-coding DNA called retroposons, which are frequently copied and pasted from one location to another within an animal’s genome.
The clue to how it got into gerbils came when Oliver Piskurek and Norihiro Okada of the Tokyo Institute of…
