微卫星DNA的多态性及其应用

微卫星DNA是广泛存在于各种真核生物基因组中的短串联重复序列,具有突变速率快、多态性高等特点,本分析了微卫星的多态性及其形成机制,并简要介绍其在亲缘关系鉴定、种群遗传结构分析、基因图谱以及基因诊断等方面的应用。     

微卫星标记及其在鸟类中的应用

微卫星DNA作为一种分子标记,以其诸多优点被认为是各类遗传标记中最有价值的一种。目前已被广泛应用于鸟类的研究中。本文介绍了微卫星DNA标记的分布特点、突变机制和作为分子标记的特点,并综述了微卫星DNA标记在鸟类的亲权分析及种类鉴定、遗传图谱构建及基因定位、物种进化历史揭示和遗传多样性研究中应用现状。     

转基因小鼠和基因突变小鼠微卫星不稳定性分析

目的探讨微卫星在转基因和基因突变小鼠中的变化,为基因修饰和遗传突变动物的遗传检测和表型分析提供理论依据和技术手段。方法根据文献报道,从GenBank中选取198个等位基因数量多、富含多态性的微卫星位点,以野生型动物为对照,对6种近交系遗传背景的转基因小鼠和5种自然基因突变的近交系小鼠进行微卫星多态性检测,选用1.5%琼脂糖凝胶电泳和STR扫描技术,比较分析微卫星不稳定性。结果共有40个微卫星位点在转基因和基因突变小鼠中表现出多态性。在基因突变小鼠中,微卫星不稳定性有55.6%(10/18)是由纯合变为杂合(Ⅰ型),有3个位点(16.6%,3/18)是纯合突变(Ⅱ型),有5个位点同时存在2种类型的突变。但是在转基因动物中,大多数的微卫星多态性为Ⅰ型突变(87.5%,28/32),只有2个位点(6.2%,2/32)是Ⅱ型突变。另外有2个位点同时存在2种类型的突变。结论基因修饰或基因突变可引起小鼠相关微卫星发生不稳定性,而且某些微卫星位点对基因改变敏感性较高。     

微卫星标记及其在动物遗传育种中的应用

微卫星标记技术一出现,就以其独特的优点引起了动物遗传育种学家的广泛关注,显示出较好的应用前景。本文就微卫星标记的特点及其在动物遗传育种中的应用作以综述。     

水曲柳核微卫星的长度同塑现象

用核微卫星的长度多态性刻画物种的种群遗传结构, 推测其进化历史是现时景观遗传学、亲缘地理学的重要研究手段之一。选择具有合适多态性且突变机制相对明确的核微卫星对研究结果的准确性至关重要。通过收集15个已被广泛使用的梣属(Fraxinus)核微卫星, 研究其在水曲柳(Fraxinus mandshurica)中的扩增稳定性, 同时应用FIASCO方法针对水曲柳新开发了9对微卫星引物, 并用克隆方法抽样检测能成功扩增的核微卫星序列, 分析其长度变异的突变机制。研究结果表明, 有66.7%的梣属核微卫星引物可以在水曲柳中稳定扩增, 但其中有70%的引物在微卫星翼区普遍存在插入缺失, 从而导致长度同塑。在新开发的9对引物中, 仅33.3%的引物在翼区存在插入缺失。研究结果显示微卫星的长度同塑现象较为普遍, 尤其是根据近缘物种开发的引物, 这种现象应在利用微卫星的研究中得到重视。     

微卫星遗传标记及其在昆虫种群遗传学中的应用

微卫星是一类短串联重复的寡核苷酸序列,广泛地分散于各类真核生物基因组中,它具有多态性高、检测结果稳定可靠等特点,是目前较为理想的群体遗传研究的分子标记之一。该文阐述了微卫星DNA构成及特点,多态性形成机制、位点获得途径,列举了微卫星遗传标记在昆虫种群遗传学研究中的应用实例,并展望了该技术的应用前景。     

ISSR标记技术及其在遗传多样性研究中的应用

ISSR(Inter-Simple Sequence Repeat)技术是在PCR中直接使用微卫星序列进行DNA扩增的一种DNA分子标记。章主要介绍了ISSR标记的原理、方法、特点及其在遗传多样性研究中的应用。ISSR标记方法具有无需知道任何靶标序列的微卫星背景信息、遗传多态性高、检测快速等特点,在遗传多样性研究中具有广泛的应用前景。     

微卫星不稳定性的生物学意义及其应用前景

微卫星为遍布于人类基因组中的简单重复序列。在人群中,它们呈现高度多态性,并且稳定遗传。微卫星的高度多态性是微卫星不稳定性的表现,它与错配修复基因的缺陷有关。微卫星不稳定性已广泛应用于肿瘤学的研究,并依此提出了肿瘤发生的“增变基因”途径。     

微卫星DNA标记技术及其在昆虫学上的应用

微卫星DNA标记作为一种多态性和稳定性高、重复性好、呈共显性的分子遗传标记技术,目前已被广泛应用于昆虫学的研究中。本文介绍了微卫星DNA标记的基本原理和特点,并综述了近年来该技术在昆虫种群遗传结构及分化、生物学特性与习性、遗传图谱的构建、基因定位以及系统发生等领域中的应用。     

微卫星分子标记及其在动物遗传育种中的研究进展

微卫星分子标记在基因组中具有含量丰富、多态性、共显性和易于检测等优点,是动物遗传育种应用中一种重要的分子标记技术。随着科学技术的飞速发展,微卫星标记的研究方法也日新月异:生物信息学技术的兴起使得微卫星位点的获得越来越方便;高通量测序技术的成熟使得开发新微卫星标记更加简单高效;自动化的序列分析仪器使得微卫星DNA的检测越来越快速准确;同时微卫星标记的应用范围也越来越广泛,其功能的开发正逐渐从刚开始的个别位点研究转变到全基因组微卫星分析。本研究简单介绍了微卫星分子标记的特点,重点综述了目前微卫星分子标记的获得、开发和筛选方法,及其在动物遗传育种中的应用,将为微卫星分子标记的研究提供理论支持。     

Mutational Dynamics of Microsatellites

Microsatellites are a ubiquitous class of simple repetitive DNA sequences, which are widespread in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic genomes. The use of microsatellites as polymorphic DNA markers has considerably increased both in the number of studies and in the number of organisms, primarily for genetic mapping, studying genomic instability in cancer, population genetics, forensics, conservation biology, molecular anthropology and in the studies of human evolutionary history. Although simple sequence repeats have been extensively used in studies encompassing varied areas of genetics, the mutation dynamics of these genome regions is still not well understood. The present review focuses on the mutational dynamics of microsatellite DNA with special reference to mutational mechanisms and their role in microsatellite evolution.     

微卫星DNA在进化中的研究进展

在过去的十年中,微卫星已经变成最流行的基因标记之一。尽管微卫星分析已有广泛的应用,然而关于微卫星DNA变异动力学的完整的画面才刚刚浮现。文章将从微卫星的起源、微卫星进化模式的推断、DNA复制的滑动是微卫星DNA变异的主要机制、影响微卫星突变率的因素、微卫星的长度分布和微卫星的频率分布等方面综述有关微卫星进化动力学方面的研究进展。     

Evolutionary dynamics of microsatellite DNA

Within the past decade microsatellites have developed into one of the most popular genetic markers. Despite the widespread use of microsatellite analysis, an integral picture of the mutational dynamics of microsatellite DNA is just beginning to emerge. Here, I review both generally agreed and controversial results about the mutational dynamics of microsatellite DNA. Microsatellites are short DNA sequence stretches in which a motif of one to six bases is tandemly repeated. It has been known for some time that these sequences can differ in repeat number among individuals. With the advent of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology this property of microsatellite DNA was converted into a highly versatile genetic marker (Litt and Luty 1989; Tautz 1989; Weber and May 1989). Polymerase chain reaction products of different length can be amplified with primers flanking the variable microsatellite region. Due to the availability of high-throughput capillary sequencers or mass spectrography the sizing of alleles is no longer a bottleneck in microsatellite analysis. The almost random distribution of microsatellites and their high level of polymorphism greatly facilitated the construction of genetic maps (Dietrich et al. 1994; Dib et al. 1996) and enabled subsequent positional cloning of several genes. Almost at the same time, microsatellites were established as the marker of choice for the identification of individuals and paternity testing. The high sensitivity of PCR-based microsatellite analysis was not only of great benefit for forensics, but opened completely new research areas, such as the analysis of samples with limited DNA amounts (e.g., many social insects) or degraded DNA (e.g., feces, museum material) (Schl?tterer and Pemberton 1998). More recently, microsatellite analysis has also been employed in population genetics (Goldstein and Schl?tterer 1999). Compared with allozymes, microsatellites offer the advantage that, in principle, several thousand potentially polymorphic markers are available. Nevertheless, the application of microsatellites to population genetic questions requires a more detailed understanding of the mutation processes of microsatellite DNA as the evolutionary time frames covered in population genetics are often too long to allow novel microsatellite mutations to be ignored. Additional interest in the evolution of microsatellite DNA comes from the discovery that trinucleotide repeats, a special class of microsatellites, are involved in human neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., fragile X and Huntington's disease). A detailed understanding of the processes underlying microsatellite instability is therefore an important contribution toward a better understanding of these human neurodegenerative diseases.     

Analysis of microsatellite mutations in buccal cells from a case-control study for lung cancer

Exposure to tobacco carcinogens is the major cause of human lung cancer, but even heavy smokers have only about a 10% life-time risk of developing lung cancer. Currently used screening processes, based largely on age and exposure status, have proven to be of limited clinical utility in predicting cancer risk. More precise methods of assessing an individual's risk of developing lung cancer are needed. Because of their sensitivity to DNA damage, microsatellites are potentially useful for the assessment of somatic mutational load in normal cells. We assessed mutational load using hypermutable microsatellites in buccal cells obtained from lung carcinoma cases and controls to test if such a measure could be used to estimate lung cancer risk. There was no significant association between smoking status and mutation frequency with any of the markers tested. No significant association between case status and mutation frequency was observed. Age was significantly related to mutation frequency in the microsatellite marker D7S1482. These observations indicate that somatic mutational load, as measured using mutation frequency of microsatellites in buccal cells, increases with increasing age but that subjects who develop lung cancer have a similar mutational load as those who remain cancer free. This finding suggests that mutation frequency of microsatellite mutations in buccal cells may not be a promising biomarker for lung cancer risk.     

Mutation and evolution of microsatellite loci in Neurospora

The patterns of mutation and evolution at 13 microsatellite loci were studied in the filamentous fungal genus Neurospora. First, a detailed investigation was performed on five microsatellite loci by sequencing each microsatellite, together with its nonrepetitive flanking regions, from a set of 147 individuals from eight species of Neurospora. To elucidate the genealogical relationships among microsatellite alleles, repeat number was mapped onto trees constructed from flanking-sequence data. This approach allowed the potentially convergent microsatellite mutations to be placed in the evolutionary context of the less rapidly evolving flanking regions, revealing the complexities of the mutational processes that have generated the allelic diversity conventionally assessed in population genetic studies. In addition to changes in repeat number, frequent substitution mutations within the microsatellites were detected, as were substitutions and insertion/deletions within the flanking regions. By comparing microsatellite and flanking-sequence divergence, clear evidence of interspecific allele length homoplasy and microsatellite mutational saturation was observed, suggesting that these loci are not appropriate for inferring phylogenetic relationships among species. In contrast, little evidence of intraspecific mutational saturation was observed, confirming the utility of these loci for population-level analyses. Frequency distributions of alleles within species were generally consistent with the stepwise mutational model. By comparing variation within species at the microsatellites and the flanking-sequence, estimated microsatellite mutation rates were approximately 2500 times greater than mutation rates of flanking DNA and were consistent with estimates from yeast and fruit flies. A positive relationship between repeat number and variance in repeat number was significant across three genealogical depths, suggesting that longer microsatellite alleles are more mutable than shorter alleles. To test if the observed patterns of microsatellite variation and mutation could be generalized, an additional eight microsatellite loci were characterized and sequenced from a subset of the same Neurospora individuals.     

Mutation Patterns at Dinucleotide Microsatellite Loci in Humans

Microsatellites are a major type of molecular markers in genetics studies. Their mutational dynamics are not clear. We investigated the patterns and characteristics of 97 mutation events unambiguously identified, from 53 multigenerational pedigrees with 630 subjects, at 362 autosomal dinucleotide microsatellite loci. A size-dependent mutation bias (in which long alleles are biased toward contraction, whereas short alleles are biased toward expansion) is observed. There is a statistically significant negative relationship between the magnitude (repeat numbers changed during mutation) and direction (contraction or expansion) of mutations and standardized allele size. Contrasting with earlier findings in humans, most mutation events (63%) in our study are multistep events that involve changes of more than one repeat unit. There was no correlation between mutation rate and recombination rate. Our data indicate that mutational dynamics at microsatellite loci are more complicated than the generalized stepwise mutation models.     

Detecting short tandem repeats from genome data: opening the software black box

Short tandem repeats, specifically microsatellites, are widely used genetic markers, associated with human genetic diseases, and play an important role in various regulatory mechanisms and evolution. Despite their importance, much is yet unknown about their mutational dynamics. The increasing availability of genome data has led to several in silico studies of microsatellite evolution which have produced a vast range of algorithms and software for tandem repeat detection. Documentation of these tools is often sparse, or provided in a format that is impenetrable to most biologists without informatics background. This article introduces the major concepts behind repeat detecting software essential for informed tool selection. We reflect on issues such as parameter settings and program bias, as well as redundancy filtering and efficiency using examples from the currently available range of programs, to provide an integrated comparison and practical guide to microsatellite detecting programs.     

On the Structural Differences Between Markers and Genomic AC Microsatellites

AC microsatellites have proved particularly useful as genetic markers. For some purposes, such as in population biology, the inferences drawn depend on the quantitative values of their mutation rates. This, together with intrinsic biological interest, has led to widespread study of microsatellite mutational mechanisms. Now, however, inconsistencies are appearing in the results of marker-based versus non-marker-based studies of mutational mechanisms. The reasons for this have not been investigated, but one possibility, pursued here, is that the differences result from structural differences between markers and genomic microsatellites. Here we report a comparison between the CEPH AC marker microsatellites and the global population of AC microsatellites in the human genome. AC marker microsatellites are longer than the global average. Controlling for length, marker microsatellites contain on average fewer interruptions, and have longer segments, than their genomic counterparts. Related to this, marker microsatellites show a greater tendency to concentrate the majority of their repeats into one segment. These differences plausibly result from scientists selecting markers for their high polymorphism. In addition to the structural differences, there are differences in the base composition of flanking sequences, marker flanking regions being richer in C and G and poorer in A and T. Our results indicate that there are profound differences between marker and genomic microsatellites that almost certainly affect their mutation rates. There is a need for a unified model of mutational mechanisms that accounts for both marker-derived and genomic observations. A suggestion is made as to how this might be done.Reviewing Editor: Dr. Magnto Nordborg     

Microsatellite variability in the entomopathogenic fungus Paecilomyces fumosoroseus: genetic diversity and population structure

The hyphomycete Paecilomyces fumosoroseus (Pfr) is a geographically widespread fungus capable of infecting various insect hosts. The fungus has been used for the biological control of several important insect pests of agriculture. However knowledge of the fungus' genetic diversity and population structure is required for its sustainable use as a biological control agent. We investigated length and sequence polymorphisms of nine microsatellite loci for 33 Pfr accessions sampled from various host species and geographical locations, and our results reveal complex mutational processes for these molecular markers. Only Pfr isolates from Bemisia tabaci were amplified successfully, indicating the existence of Pfr genotypes specifically associated with B. tabaci. Genetic relationships among the 25 Pfr isolates from B. tabaci were inferred from allelic variability data at eight microsatellite loci that were polymorphic and subsequently from sequence data from the flanking regions of three selected loci. Maximum parsimony and neighbor joining analyses partitioned Pfr genetic diversity in two major lineages. One lineage included genotypes from the B-biotype of B. tabaci distributed across the Americas and was strongly supported in both analyses. Another lineage was distributed across Asia and consisted of four distinct clusters. Allele size homoplasy was found at the three microsatellite loci. We obtained better discrimination and resolution of the relationships among isolates with sequence data, although not all isolates could be typed. Thus sequencing of microsatellite flanking regions and repeats is a promising approach for the identification of Pfr isolates that specifically infect certain B. tabaci biotypes and phylogeographic studies.     

Loss of heterozygosity on chromosomes 1, 2, 8, 9 and 17 in cerebral atherosclerotic plaques

OBJECTIVE: Atherosclerosis is a fibroproliferative disease which has been attributed to several factors including genetic and molecular alterations. Initial studies have shown genetic alterations at the microsatellite level in the DNA of atherosclerotic plaques. Extending our initial findings, we performed a microsatellite analysis on cerebral atherosclerotic plaques. METHODS: Twenty-seven cerebral atherosclerotic plaques were assessed for loss of heterozygosity (LOH) and microsatellite instability (MI) using 25 microsatellite markers located on chromosomes 2, 8, 9 and 17. DNA was extracted from the vessels as well as the respective blood from each patient and subjected to polymerase chain reaction. RESULTS: Our analyses revealed that specific loci on chromosomes 2, 8, 9 and 17 exhibited a significant incidence of LOH. Forty-six percent of the specimens showed loss of heterozygosity at 2p13-p21, 48% exhibited LOH at 8p12-q11.2, while allelic imbalance was detected in 47% of the cases. The LOH incidence was 39%, 31% and 27% at 17q21, 9q31-34 and 17p13, respectively. Genetic alterations were detected at a higher rate as compared to the corresponding alterations observed in plaques from other vessels. DISCUSSION: This is the first microsatellite analysis using atherosclerotic plaques obtained from cerebral vessels. Our results indicate an elevated mutational rate on specific chromosomal loci, suggesting a potential implication of these regions in atherogenesis.