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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Divergent microsatellite evolution in the human and chimpanzee lineages
Zoltán Gáspári1, Csaba Ortutay, Gábor Tóth
1Institute of Chemistry, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/A, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary.
Abstract:
Comparison of the complete human genome sequence to one of its closest relatives, the chimpanzee genome, provides a unique opportunity for exploring recent evolutionary events affecting the microsatellites in these species. A simple assumption on microsatellite distribution is that the total length of perfect repeats is constant compared to that of imperfect ones regardless of the repeat sequence. In this paper, we show that this is valid for most of the chimpanzee genome but not for a number of human chromosomes. Our results suggest accelerated evolution of microsatellites in the human genome relative to the chimpanzee lineage.
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