Cancer-causing Gene May Have ‘Jumped’ From Plants Into Humans
8th July 2018
The world’s largest analysis of so-called “jumping genes” has revealed the crucial role of an element known as L1, which the new data shows entered humans about 150 million years ago.
The foreign piece of coding has proved particularly dynamic and is responsible for many of the accelerated changes in human evolution since then.
However, without it humans would be free from the crucial genetic mutations which cause many deadly cancers.