Tame affairs: domesticated transposase and domestic pigs

Long thought to be genomic junk, domesticated transposons have turned out to be an incredible source of new genes. Two studies—one this issue of EMBO reports—show that a domesticated hAT transposase is a transcriptional repressor of IGF2 that regulates muscle growth and has over 1,200 additional putative targets in the mammalian genome.