In: Biology
What is a repetitive element? what are the types of repetitive elements? what is their effect on the ease of determining/analyzing a genome sequence?
- Repetitive elements are the patterns of nucleic acids - DNA or RNA that occur in multiple copies throughout the genome.
- The types of repetitive elements include -
1. Tandem repeats
2. Satellite DNA
3. Interspersed repeats
4. Transposable elements
- Repetitive elements exhibit a high degree of polymorphism due to variation in number of their repeats. This hyprvariability makes repetitive elements excellent markers for mapping.