Replicative transposition is a mechanism of transposition in molecular biology, proposed by James A. Shapiro in 1979, in which the transposable element is duplicated during the reaction, so that the transposing entity is a copy of the original element. In this mechanism, the donor and receptor DNA sequences form a characteristic intermediate "theta" configuration, sometimes called a "Shapiro intermediate". Replicative transposition is characteristic to retrotransposons and occurs from time to time in class II transposons.
References
Shapiro, J. A. (1979), "Molecular model for the transposition and replication of bacteriophage Mu and other transposable elements" (PDF), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 76 (4): 1933–1937, doi:10.1073/pnas.76.4.1933, PMC 383507, PMID 287033. /wiki/James_A._Shapiro ↩
Bushman, Frederic (2002), Lateral DNA transfer: mechanisms and consequences, CSHL Press, p. 46, ISBN 978-0-87969-621-4. 978-0-87969-621-4 ↩
Chaconas, George; Harshey, Rasika M. (2002), "Transposition of phage Mu DNA", in Craig, N. L.; Craigie, R.; Gellert, M.; Lambowitz, A. M. (eds.), Mobile DNA II, American Society for Microbiology, pp. 384–402, ISBN 9781555812096. 9781555812096 ↩