Informatic analysis of tandem repeats in the human genome

Abstract

Due to the success of Human Genome Project, the focus now is to produce a precise depiction of the genome and to reveal biologically important features. We surveyed the occurrence of tandem repeats in the human genome and observed the abundance of 84 base pair repeats on chromosome 19. Phylogenetic analysis of the 84bp repeats sequences provided substantial evidence of the strong relationship between 84bp repeats sequences and their locations.We disproved the hypothesis that the high frequency of 84bp repeats in Chr19 was mainly due to gene duplication. Then we postulated that the biological functions of genes influence the occurrence of repeats, as the majority of 84bp repeats occur in the zinc finger family of genes. Finally, we predicted the existence of novel protein coding sequences containing 84bp repeats in cluster 2 on Chr19 (18 to 25 Mbp), which share some biological features of known genes.