Current Advances in the Studies of Sleeping Beauty Transposition

The application of transposon in vertebrate is far behind of the use in other biological systems. Sleeping beautySB transposon is a Tc1/mariner-like transposon that was reconstructed from the salmonid genome by restoring its activity through the correction of accumulated mutations in 1997. The study during the few years showed that SB transposon was the transposition in vertebrates with the highest transposition activity. This paper emphasizes the structure the transposition mechanism and the application of SB transposon. Several issues of the application of SB transposon were also mentioned.