A comprehensive microsatellite landscape of human Y-DNA at kilobase resolution.

BACKGROUND: Though interest in human simple sequence repeats (SSRs) is increasing, little is known about the exact distributional features of numerous SSRs in human Y-DNA at chromosomal level. Herein, totally 540 maps were established, which could clearly display SSR landscape in every bin of 1 k base pairs (Kbp) along the sequenced part of human reference Y-DNA (NC_000024.10), by our developed differential method for improving the existing method to reveal SSR distributional characteristics in large genomic sequences. RESULTS: The maps show that SSRs accumulate significantly with forming density peaks in at least 2040 bins of 1 Kbp, which involve different coding, noncoding and intergenic regions of the Y-DNA, and 10 especially high density peaks were reported to associate with biological significances, suggesting that the other hundreds of especially high density peaks might also be biologically significant and worth further analyzing. In contrast, the maps also show that SSRs are extremely sparse in at least 207 bins of 1 Kbp, including many noncoding and intergenic regions of the Y-DNA, which is inconsistent with the widely accepted view that SSRs are mostly rich in these regions, and these sparse distributions are possibly due to powerfully regional selection. Additionally, many regions harbor SSR clusters with same or similar motif in the Y-DNA. CONCLUSIONS: These 540 maps may provide the important information of clearly position-related SSR distributional features along the human reference Y-DNA for better understanding the genome structures of the Y-DNA. This study may contribute to further exploring the biological significance and distribution law of the huge numbers of SSRs in human Y-DNA.

Comparative analysis of microsatellites and compound microsatellites in T4-like viruses.

Microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are known to present ubiquitously in genomes of eukaryotes and prokaryotes, as well as viruses. A comprehensive analysis of microsatellites and compound microsatellites (CM) was performed for 67 T4-like bacteriophage genomes. We found that the number of repeats was generally proportional to the size of the genome. CM were more abundant in genic regions, while their relative abundance was higher in intergenic regions. Meanwhile, the number of CM rapidly decreased with the increase of complexity but gradually increased with higher dMAX (maximum distance between any two adjacent microsatellites). (A)n/(T)n, (AT)n/(TA)n and (AAG)n were the most abundant repeats of mono-, di- and trinucleotide microsatellites, respectively. The number of microsatellites in reference sequences was significantly lower than that in corresponding random sequences. This result was mainly attributed to mono- and dinucleotide repeats which hardly exceeded 6bp in T4-like viruses. These observations may be helpful to understand the distribution of microsatellites and viral genetic diversity in T4-like viruses.