Isolation of simple-sequence loci for use in polymerase chain reaction-based DNA fingerprinting

Simple sequences are short regions of tandem repetitions of mono-, di-, tri-, or tetranucleotide motifs and occur as repetitive elements in all eukaryotic genomes. These regions tend to be hypervariable in length and can therefore be exploited for DNA fingerprinting purposes, using the polymerase chain reaction with primers flanking such regions. We describe how suitable simple-sequence loci can be isolated from any given eukaryotic DNA. We show the DNA sequences for a number of variants of such loci and discuss the current results on their usefulness for DNA fingerprinting.