A genome contains all of the DNA of every living organism, but its contents don’t stop there – most of these structures also contain snippets of DNA that can copy and paste themselves to “infect” a genome, expanding its size. Precisely why that happens remains a mystery. 

Researchers have created a new computational tool that works from an inferred ancestral point and evolves forward to the modern-day genome to trace the insertion and deletion dynamics of these “jumping genes,” known as transposable elements.