PubMed · 2962060
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J Williams. Down syndrome article clarified.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2962060/
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Recent studies have shown that the human genome has a haplotype block structure such that it can be decomposed into large blocks with high linkage disequilibrium (LD) and relatively limited haplotype diversity, separated by short regions of low LD. One of the practical implications of this observation is that only a small fraction of all the single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (referred as "tag SNPs") can be chosen for mapping genes responsible for human complex diseases, which can significantly reduce genotyping effort, without much loss of power. Algorithms have been developed to partition haplotypes into blocks with the minimum number of tag SNPs for an entire chromosome. In practice, investigators may have limited resources, and only a certain number of SNPs can be genotyped. In the present article, we first formulate this problem as finding a block partition with a fixed number of tag SNPs that can cover the maximal percentage of the whole genome, and we then develop two dynamic programming algorithms to solve this problem. The algorithms are sufficiently flexible to permit knowledge of functional polymorphisms to be considered. We apply the algorithms to a data set of SNPs on human chromosome 21, combining the information of coding and noncoding regions. We study the density of SNPs in intergenic regions, introns, and exons, and we find that the SNP density in intergenic regions is similar to that in introns and is higher than that in exons, results that are consistent with previous studies. We also calculate the distribution of block break points in intergenic regions, genes, exons, and coding regions and do not find any significant differences.
We seek to define sequence-based predictive criteria to identify polymorphic and hypermutable minisatellites in the human genome. Polymorphism of a representative pool of minisatellites, selected from human chromosomes 21 and 22, was experimentally measured by PCR typing in a population of unrelated individuals. Two predictive approaches were tested. One uses simple repeat characteristics (e.g., unit length, copy number, nucleotide bias) and a more complex measure, termed HistoryR, based on the presence of variant motifs in the tandem array. We find that HistoryR and percentage of GC are strongly correlated with polymorphism and, as predictive criteria, reduce by half the number of repeats to type while enriching the proportion with heterozygosity >/=0.5, from a background level of 43% to 59%. The second approach uses length differences between minisatellites in the two releases of the human genome sequence (from the public consortium and Celera). As a predictor, this similarly enriches the number of polymorphic minisatellites, but fails to identify an unexpectedly large number of these. Finally, typing of the highly polymorphic minisatellites in large families identified one new hypermutable minisatellite, located in a predicted coding sequence. This may represent the first coding human hypermutable minisatellite.
Down syndrome (DS) is one of the most common chromosomal disorders; however, the molecular pathogenesis and cause remains elusive. Many advances have been made in pre-natal screening and detection, but there have been few real advances in the primary prevention or treatment of DS. DS individuals have been depicted on several philatelic materials; we present some of these stamps and philatelic covers, as well as other complementary stamps, as a means to illustrate issues relevant to this disorder.