Trinucleotide repeats (TNRs) undergo frequent mutations in families affected by TNR diseases and in model organisms. Much of the instability is conferred in cis by the sequence and length of the triplet tract. Trans-acting factors also modulate TNR instability risk, on the basis of such evidence as parent-of-origin effects. To help identify trans-acting modifiers, a screen was performed to find...

Peptides derived from conserved heptad repeat (HR) regions of paramyxovirus fusion (F) proteins inhibit viral fusion by interfering with the formation of the fusogenic six-helix bundle structure. Peptide efficacy is affected by the strength of the peptide association with the target virus's complementary HR region. Here, we show that a second basis for peptide efficacy lies in the kinetics of F...

Tandem repeats of certain trinucleotides show extensive intergenerational instability in humans that is associated with a class of genetic disorders known as the Triplet Expansion Diseases. This instability is thought to be a consequence of the formation of intrastrand structures, including hairpins, triplexes and tetraplexes, by the tandem repeats. I show here that CGG-repeats which are associ...

Rye (Secale cereale L.) is important food crop in Russia. The study of the genetic diversity crops carried out using molecular markers. To identify effective primers, ISSR (Inter Simple Sequence Repeats), a method for determining DNA polymorphism, was used.The selection primers according to largest number polymorphic fragments, their clear amplification and reproducibility repeated PCR. Of 22 a...

We fit a Markov chain model of microsatellite evolution introduced by Kruglyak et al. to data on all di-, tri-, and tetranucleotide repeats in the yeast genome. Our results suggest that many features of the distribution of abundance and length of microsatellites can be explained by this simple model, which incorporates a competition between slippage events and base pair substitutions, with no n...