Meeting Report for Mobile DNA 2010

The meeting was launched with a Keynote Address by Frederic Bushman (University of Pennsylvania, USA). Bushman summarized the extensive work his laboratory has conducted over the past several years to better understand mechanisms of retroviral integration. The Bushman laboratory pioneered the use of high throughput sequencing methods to map large numbers of retrovirus insertion sites. Bushman described how this approach revealed a preference for HIV to integrate into transcription units and the features of transcriptionally active chromatin that characterize these preferred sites. The relevance of this work was brought home when Bushman discussed integration patterns in the genomes of patients who received retroviral gene therapy. A better mechanistic understanding of how integration sites are selected should lead to better therapeutic approaches and limit the mutagenic outcome that caused leukemia in some of these patients.Over the past several years, mobile DNA has progressively moved from second fiddle to centre stage in the field of genome evolution. The 'genome evolution' session highlighted the intricate and intertwined evolutionary trajectories of parasitic elements and their host genomes. Presenters and audience alike were amazed by the omnipresence and bewildering diversity of mobile DNA as they swung from one branch of the tree of life to another (including plants, primates, fruit flies, fungi, bacteria and a grab bag of protists).Although viruses are found virtually everywhere on the planet, it is in the oceans that their abundance and extraordinary diversity is the most impressive, as Curtis Suttle (University of British Colombia, Canada) explained. He argued that viruses should be viewed both as an essential component of the ecosystem and as a threat to cellular organisms.A flurry of talks by Mark Batzer (Louisiana State University, USA), Brandon Gaut (University of California, Irvine, USA), Pierre Capy (CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France) and Richard Cordaux