Abstract
A prominent feature of the human genome, and many other higher eukaryotic genomes, is the abundance of repeated sequences. These multi-copy sequences may be dispersed around the genome, like the Alu and L1 elements (Schmid and Jelinek,1982; Singer and Skowronski,1985), or, by contrast, found in tandemly repeated arrays. These tandem arrays fall into a wide variety of size classes: the major alphoid satellite sequences, for example (Waye and Willard,1986), which exist in chromosome-specific subclasses, between them account for about 5% of the human genome. The blocks of alphoid satellite are composed of tandem arrays up to 5Mb in length (Willard,1991), and appear to correspond to the functional part of human centromeres (Willard,1990). At the other end of the scale, “microsatellites”, short arrays (generally up to 60bp) of dinucleotide repeats, are extremely abundant, and widely dispersed in the genome (Weber and May,1989; Litt and Luty,1989; Weber,1990). Our work, and this review, concern tandem arrays of intermediate size, the “minisatellite” loci (Jeffreys et al.,1985a, Jeffreys et al.,1985b). These arrays have a total length usually in the range 0.5-30kb, composed of short repeated units. The repeat units at the loci we have studied in detail range between 8 and 90bp in length.
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Armour, J.A.L. et al. (1993). Minisatellite mutation and recombination. In: Chromosomes Today. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1510-0_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1510-0_26
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