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For much of the 20th century, genes were considered to be stable entities arranged in an orderly linear pattern on chromosomes, like beads on a string (1). In the late 1940s, Barbara McClintock challenged existing concepts of what genes were capable of when she discovered that some genes could be mobile. Her studies of chromosome breakage in maize led her to discover a chromosome-breaking locus that could change its position within a chromosome. McClintock went on to discover other such mobile elements, now known as transposons. She also found that depending on where they inserted into a chromosome these mobile elements could reversibly alter the expression of other genes. She summarized her data on the first transposable elements she discovered, Ac and Ds, in a 1950 PNAS Classic Article, “The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize” (2). Although their existence was accepted relatively soon after by maize geneticists, the widespread nature of mobile genetic elements and the implications of McClintock’s discovery took decades to be widely recognized. Barbara McClintock at her laboratory desk, 1971. By the 1970s the great strides made in molecular biology led to the discovery of transposons in other organisms, starting with viruses and bacteria. We now know that transposons constitute more than 65% of our genomes and approximately 85% of the maize genome. “Transposons are astonishingly abundant, comprising a majority of the DNA in some species,” said Nina Fedoroff, a professor at Penn State University and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and author of the PNAS Classic Perspective on McClintock’s article, “McClintock’s challenge in the 21st century” (3). Confirmation that transposons were widespread among eukaryotes eventually led to the wider appreciation of her original discovery. McClintock received a number of prestigious awards, including the 1970 National Medal of Science and culminating …

Barbara McClintock and the discovery of jumping genes