Abstract
Vertebrate genomes are mosaics of isochores, namely of long, compositionally homogeneous DNA segments which can be subdivided into a small number of families characterized by different GC levels.In the human genome,which is representative of a number of mammalian genomes and, more broadly, of the genomes of warm-blooded vertebrates, the compositional spectrum of isochores ranges between 30% and 60% GC, and five families of isochores have been identified, two GC-poor families, Ll and L2, representing together 62% of the genome, and three GC-rich families, H1, H2 and H3, representing 22%, 9% and 3%, respectively. The remaining 4% of the genome consists of satellite and ribosomal DNAs, which can also be visualized as isochores, because of their homogeneous base composition (Bernardi, 1989).
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Bernardi, G. (1993). The vertebrate genome: isochores and chromosomal bands. In: Chromosomes Today. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1510-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1510-0_4
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