The PiggyBac (PB) transposon system employs a genetically engineered transposase enzyme to insert a gene into a cell's genome.
It is built upon the natural PiggyBac (PB) transposable element (transposon), enabling the back and forth movement of genes between chromosomes and genetic vectors such as plasmids through a "cut and paste" mechanism.
The powerful activity of the PiggyBac transposon system enables genes of interest between the two ITRs in the PB vector to be easily mobilized into target genomes.
[2][3] The TTAA-specific, short repeat elements are a group of transposons that share similarity of structure and properties of movement.
There are two other TTAA-specific fossil repeat elements, MER75 and MER85 (estimated at 2000 copies per genome) which appear to target TTAA insertion sites and terminate in 5' CCC....GGG 3'.
[11] A novel member of the piggyBac family hyperactive Mage (MG) transposase (hyMagease) exhibited strong transposability in a variety of mammalian cells and primary T cells and a weaker insertion preference for near genes, transcription start sites, CpG islands, and DNaseI hypersensitive sites in comparison to piggyBac.