Mutation of human short tandem repeats.

Editorial: Could Speciation Across Evolution be Governed by Genetic Switch Codes at Short Tandem Repeats?

A Brief Review of Short Tandem Repeat Mutation

Short tandem repeats (STRs) are short tandemly repeated DNA sequences that involve a repetitive unit of 1-6 bp. Because of their polymorphisms and high mutation rates, STRs are widely used in biological research. Strand-slippage replication is the predominant mutation mechanism of STRs, and the stepwise mutation model is regarded as the main mutation model. STR mutation rates can be influenced ...

Numerous length polymorphisms at short tandem repeats in human cytomegalovirus.

We show the presence of numerous short tandem repeats in the human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) genome and assess their usefulness as molecular markers. The genome is shown to contain at least 24 microsatellite regions that exhibit length polymorphisms. Insertion-deletion polymorphisms at these short tandem repeats are common (80% of repeats examined are polymorphic among two laboratory strains and 1...

Segmental Duplications as a Complement Strategy to Short Tandem Repeats in the Prenatal Diagnosis of Down Syndrome

Background: Quantitative fluorescence-polymerase chain reaction (QF-PCR) is an inexpensive and accurate method for the prenatal diagnosis of aneuploidies that applies short tandem repeats (STRs) as a chromosome-specific marker. Despite its apparent advantages, QF-PCR is not applicable in all cases due to the presence of uninformative STRs. This study was carried out to investigate the efficienc...

The Challenge of Small-Scale Repeats for Indel Discovery

Repetitive sequences are abundant in the human genome. Different classes of repetitive DNA sequences, including simple repeats, tandem repeats, segmental duplications, interspersed repeats, and other elements, collectively span more than 50% of the genome. Because repeat sequences occur in the genome at different scales they can cause various types of sequence analysis errors, including in alig...

Short tandem repeats and genetic variation.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are widely distributed in the human genome and although most SNPs are the result of independent point-mutations, there are exceptions. When studying distances between SNPs, a periodic pattern in the distance between pairs of identical SNPs has been found to be heavily correlated with periodicity in short tandem repeats (STRs). STRs are short DNA segments, ...