What does "transposon" mean?

A segment of DNA that can move to a different position within a genome, or to the genome of another species.

What is a synonym for "transposon"?

Common synonyms include: jumping gene, jumping gene, te, transposable element.

Transposon

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A segment of DNA that can move to a different position within a genome, or to the genome of another species.
"2002, Ahmet Ipek, Introduction of an Ac/Ds Based Two-element Transposon Tagging System and Trans-activation of Ds in Carrot (Daucus Carota L.), University of Wisconsin–Madison, page 44, Transposon tagging is a powerful technique to identify and clone genes. The successful application of transposon tagging requires previous identification and cloning of a transposon in the species under consideration."
2
a segment of DNA that can become integrated at many different sites along a chromosome (especially a segment of bacterial DNA that can be translocated as a whole) wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

jumping gene jumping gene te transposable element

Example

More examples

"2002, Ahmet Ipek, Introduction of an Ac/Ds Based Two-element Transposon Tagging System and Trans-activation of Ds in Carrot (Daucus Carota L.), University of Wisconsin–Madison, page 44, Transposon tagging is a powerful technique to identify and clone genes. The successful application of transposon tagging requires previous identification and cloning of a transposon in the species under consideration."

Etymology

From transpose + -on.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.