The general interest of our laboratory is nucleic acid transactions, specifically, the mechanisms of DNA recombination used to mobilize transposable DNA elements (a process called transposition) and how RNA binding proteins control patterns of alternative pre-mRNA splicing. About half the human genome is composed of transposons; transposable DNA insertions have been linked to human disease gene mutations and chromosomal rearrangements and are thought to be important for genome and organismal evolution.