Could “genome” be a misnomer? The name implies that our genetic information is mainly genes, yet when the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, it revealed that genes comprise a tiny minority. About 98 percent of the genome is something else — a kind of genomic dark matter.

We chat with an astrophysicist-turned-genome-biologist, Assistant Professor Molly Hammell, about how she ended up studying a type of genomic dark matter called transposons.