>For more than a decade, Feschotte has pointed to transposons as the ultimate innovators in eukaryotic genomes. To be clear, there is a long history of scienti

>For more than a decade, Feschotte has pointed to transposons as the ultimate innovators in eukaryotic genomes. To be clear, there is a long history of scientific theories and studies on how transposable elements are key to eukaryotic genome evolution, regulatory network formation and genome plasticity, predating the review linked in that sentence - in fact, dating all the way back to Barbara McClintock. I would call this an under-studied area of genomics - I think there are still quite a few Nobel prizes to be made in transposon-mediated evolution. The new Feschotte article (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabc6405 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabc6405) demonstrates a transcription factor in bats and uses a reporter assay to link it to signatures of transposon activity, and also uses comparative genomics to identify lineage-specific signatures of transposon activity in tetrapods. This is a big step forward, especially in using reporter assays to link TE activity to TF networks in mammals, but I think the next step would be to do both the in silico and the in vitro experiment together (use a reporter assay to prove that lineage-specific regulatory network patterns are linked to transposon activity).