hairpin transfer

English

Noun

hairpin transfer (plural hairpin transfers)

1. (genetics) Transfer of genetic information from a strand of nucleic acid that terminates in a hairpin ribozyme by first detaching one side of the base of the hairpin, so that the hairpin is flattened out before making the RNA copy.
   • 1999, Allan Granoff, Robert G. Webster, Encyclopedia of Virology:

     Because the terminal sequences are not perfect inverted repeats, hairpin transfer results in two end sequences that are related but the inverted complement of each other.

   • 2005, Jonathan Kerr, Susan Cotmore, Marshall E Bloom, Parvoviruses, page 194:

     Conclusive evidence that hairpin transfer does occur as hypothesized was provided by assays that employed a closed hairpin form of the viral ITR, which was constructed from the cloned AAV genome (Snyder et al., 1990).