Genome-wide analysis of microsatellite repeats in humans: their abundance and density in specific genomic regions

Background  

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are found in most organisms, and occupy about 3% of the human genome. Although it is becoming clear that such repeats are important in genomic organization and function and may be associated with disease conditions, their systematic analysis has not been reported. This is the first report examining the distribution and density of simple sequence repeats (1-6 base-pairs (bp)) in the entire human genome.