Bisulfite probing reveals DNA structural intricacies.

In recent decades, study of DNA structure has largely been focused on the interrelationships between nucleotides at the level of nearest neighbours. A little-utilized approach to probing structure on a larger scale is non-denaturing bisulfite modification of genomic DNA in conjunction with high-throughput sequencing. This technique revealed a marked gradient in reactivity increasing towards the 5' end of poly-dC:dG mononucleotide repeats as short as two base pairs, suggesting that access of the anion may be greater at these points due to positive-roll bending not predicted by existing models. Consistent with this, the 5' ends of these repeats are strikingly enriched at positions relative to the nucleosome dyad that bend towards the major groove, while their 3' ends tend to sit outside these areas. Mutation rates are also higher at the 5' ends of poly-dC:dG when CpG dinucleotides are excluded. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying bending/flexibility of the DNA double helix as well as the sequences that facilitate DNA packaging.

Microsatellite polymorphisms associated with human behavioural and psychological phenotypes including a gene-environment interaction.

BACKGROUND: The genetic and environmental influences on human personality and behaviour are a complex matter of ongoing debate. Accumulating evidence indicates that short tandem repeats (STRs) in regulatory regions are good candidates to explain heritability not accessed by genome-wide association studies. METHODS: We tested for associations between the genotypes of four selected repeats and 18 traits relating to personality, behaviour, cognitive ability and mental health in a well-studied longitudinal birth cohort (n = 458-589) using one way analysis of variance. The repeats were a highly conserved poly-AC microsatellite in the upstream promoter region of the T-box brain 1 (TBR1) gene and three previously studied STRs in the activating enhancer-binding protein 2-beta (AP2-ß) and androgen receptor (AR) genes. Where significance was found we used multiple regression to assess the influence of confounding factors. RESULTS: Carriers of the shorter, most common, allele of the AR gene's GGN microsatellite polymorphism had fewer anxiety-related symptoms, which was consistent with previous studies, but in our study this was not significant following Bonferroni correction. No associations with two repeats in the AP2-ß gene withstood this correction. A novel finding was that carriers of the minor allele of the TBR1 AC microsatellite were at higher risk of conduct problems in childhood at age 7-9 (p = 0.0007, which did pass Bonferroni correction). Including maternal smoking during pregnancy (MSDP) in models controlling for potentially confounding influences showed that an interaction between TBR1 genotype and MSDP was a significant predictor of conduct problems in childhood and adolescence (p < 0.001), and of self-reported criminal behaviour up to age 25 years (p ≤ 0.02). This interaction remained significant after controlling for possible confounders including maternal age at birth, socio-economic status and education, and offspring birth weight. CONCLUSIONS: The potential functional importance of the TBR1 gene's promoter microsatellite deserves further investigation. Our results suggest that it participates in a gene-environment interaction with MDSP and antisocial behaviour. However, previous evidence that mothers who smoke during pregnancy carry genes for antisocial behaviour suggests that epistasis may influence the interaction.

High frequency of microsatellites in S. cerevisiae meiotic recombination hotspots.

BACKGROUND: Microsatellites are highly abundant in eukaryotic genomes but their function and evolution are not yet well understood. Their elevated mutation rate makes them ideal markers of genetic difference, but high levels of unexplained heterogeneity in mutation rates among microsatellites at different genomic locations need to be elucidated in order to improve the power and accuracy of the many types of study that use them as genetic markers. Recombination could contribute to this heterogeneity, since while replication errors are thought to be the predominant mechanism for microsatellite mutation, meiotic recombination is involved in some mutation events. There is also evidence suggesting that microsatellites could function as recombination signals. The yeast S. cerevisiae is a useful model organism with which to further explore the link between microsatellites and recombination, since it is very amenable to genetic study, and meiotic recombination hotspots have been mapped throughout its entire genome. RESULTS: We examined in detail the relationship between microsatellites and hotspots of meiotic double-strand breaks, the precursors of meiotic recombination, throughout the S. cerevisiae genome. We included all tandem repeats with motif length (repeat period) between one and six base pairs. Long, short and two-copy arrays were considered separately. We found that long, mono-, di- and trinucleotide microsatellites are around twice as frequent in hot than non-hot intergenic regions. The associations are weak or absent for repeats with less than six copies, and also for microsatellites with 4-6 base pair motifs, but high-copy arrays with motif length greater than three are relatively very rare throughout the genome. We present evidence that the association between high-copy, short-motif microsatellites and recombination hotspots is not driven by effects on microsatellite distribution of other factors previously linked to both recombination and microsatellites, including transcription, GC-content and transposable elements. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that a mutation bias relating to recombination hotspots causing repeats to form and grow, and/or regulation of a subset of hotspots by simple sequences, may be significant processes in yeast. Some previous evidence has cast doubt on both of these possibilities, and as a result they have not been explored on a large scale, but the strength of the association we report suggests that they deserve further experimental testing.

Functional Mechanisms of Microsatellite DNA in Eukaryotic Genomes.

Microsatellite repeat DNA is best known for its length mutability, which is implicated in several neurological diseases and cancers, and often exploited as a genetic marker. Less well-known is the body of work exploring the widespread and surprisingly diverse functional roles of microsatellites. Recently, emerging evidence includes the finding that normal microsatellite polymorphism contributes substantially to the heritability of human gene expression on a genome-wide scale, calling attention to the task of elucidating the mechanisms involved. At present, these are underexplored, but several themes have emerged. I review evidence demonstrating roles for microsatellites in modulation of transcription factor binding, spacing between promoter elements, enhancers, cytosine methylation, alternative splicing, mRNA stability, selection of transcription start and termination sites, unusual structural conformations, nucleosome positioning and modification, higher order chromatin structure, noncoding RNA, and meiotic recombination hot spots.

Association of poly-purine/poly-pyrimidine sequences with meiotic recombination hot spots.

BACKGROUND: Meiotic recombination events have been found to concentrate in 1-2.5 kilo base regions, but these recombination hot spots do not share a consensus sequence and why they occur at specific sites is not fully understood. Some previous evidence suggests that poly-purine/poly-pyrimidine (poly-pu/py) tracts (PPTs), a class of sequence with distinctive biochemical properties, could be involved in recombination, but no general association of PPTs with meiotic recombination hot spots has previously been reported. RESULTS: We used computational methods to investigate in detail the relationship between PPTs and hot spots. We show statistical associations of PPT frequency with hot spots of meiotic recombination initiating lesions, double-strand breaks, in the genome of the yeast S. cerevisiae and with experimentally well characterized human meiotic recombination hot spots. Supporting a possible role of poly-pu/py-rich sequences in hot spot recombination, we also found that all three single nucleotide polymorphisms previously shown to be associated with human hot spot activity changes occur within sequence contexts of 14 bp or longer that are 85% or more poly-pu/py and at least 70% G/C. These polymorphisms are all close to the hot spot mid points. Comparing the sequences of experimentally characterized human hot spots with the orthologous regions of the chimpanzee genome previously shown not to contain hot spots, we found that in all five cases in which comparisons for the hot spot central regions are possible with publicly available sequence data, there are differences near the human hot spot mid points within sequences 14 bp or longer consisting of more than 80% poly-pu/py and at least 50% G/C. CONCLUSION: Our results, along with previous evidence for the unique biochemical properties and recombination-stimulating potential of poly-pu/py-rich sequences, suggest that the possible functional involvement of this type of sequence in meiotic recombination hot spots deserves further experimental exploration.

No effect of genome-wide copy number variation on measures of intelligence in a New Zealand birth cohort.

Variation in human intelligence is approximately 50% heritable, but understanding of the genes involved is limited. Several forms of genetic variation remain under-studied in relation to intelligence, one of which is copy number variation (CNV). Using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) -based microarrays, we genotyped CNVs genome-wide in a birth cohort of 723 New Zealanders, and correlated them with four intelligence-related phenotypes. We found no significant association for any common CNV after false discovery correction, which is consistent with previous work. In contrast to a previous study, however, we found no effect on any cognitive measure of rare CNV burden, defined as total number of bases inserted or deleted in CNVs rarer than 5%. We discuss possible reasons for this failure to replicate, including interaction between CNV and aging in determining the effects of rare CNVs. While our results suggest that no CNV assayable by SNP chips contributes more than a very small amount to variation in human intelligence, it remains possible that common CNVs in segmental duplication arrays, which are not well covered by SNP chips, are important contributors.

Important characteristics of sequence-specific recombination hotspots in Schizosaccharomyces pombe.

In many organisms, meiotic recombination occurs preferentially at a limited number of sites in the genome known as hotspots. In the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, simple sequence motifs determine the location of at least some, and possibly most or all, hotspots. Recently, we showed that a large number of different sequences can create hotspots. Among those sequences we identified some recurring motifs that fell into at least five distinct families, including the well-characterized CRE family of hotspots. Here we report the essential sequence for activity of two of the novel hotspots, the oligo-C and CCAAT hotspots, and identify associated trans-acting factors required for hotspot activity. The oligo-C hotspot requires a unique 8-bp sequence, CCCCGCAC, though hotspot activity is also significantly affected by adjacent nucleotides. The CCAAT hotspot requires a more complex and degenerate sequence, including the originally identified seven nucleotide CCAATCA sequence at its core. We identified transcription factors, the CCAAT-binding factor (CBF) and Rst2, which are required specifically for activity of the CCAAT hotspots and oligo-C hotspots, respectively. Each of these factors binds to its respective motifs in vitro. However, unlike CRE, the sequence required for hotspot activity is larger than the sequence required for binding, suggesting the involvement of additional factors.