Highly repetitive component alpha and related alphoid DNAs in man and monkeys

The genomes of Old-World, New-World, and prosimian primates contain members of a large class of highly repetitive DNAs that are related to one another and to component alpha DNA of the African green monkey by their sequence homologies and restriction site periodicities. The members of this class of highly repetitive DNAs are termed the alphoid DNAs, after the prototypical member, component alpha of the African green monkey which was the first such DNA to be identified (Maio, 1971) and sequenced (Rosenberg et al., 1978). The alphoid DNAs appear to be uniquely primate sequences.--From the restriction enzyme cleavage patterns and Southern blot hybridizations under different stringency conditions, the alphoid DNAs comprise multiple sequence families exhibiting varying degrees of homology to component alpha DNA. They also share common elements in their restriction site periodicities (172 . n base-pairs), in the long-range organization of their repeating units, and in their banding behavior in CsCl and Cs2SO4 bouyant density gradients, in which they band within the bulk DNA as cryptic repetitive components.--In the three species from the Family Cercopithecidae examined, the alphoid DNAs represent the most abundant, tandemly repetitive sequence components, comprising about 24% of the African green monkey genome and 8 to 10% of the Rhesus monkey and baboon genomes. In restriction digests, the bulk of the alphoid DNAs among the Cercopithecidae appeared quantitatively reduced to a simple series of arithmetic segments based on a 172 base-pair (bp) repeat. In contrast with these simple restriction patterns, complex patterns were observed when human alphoid DNAs were cleaved with restriction enzymes. Detailed analysis revealed that the human genome contains multiple alphoid sequence families which differ from one another both in their repeat sequence organization and in their degree of homology to the African green monkey component alpha DNA.--The finding of alphoid sequences in other Old-World primate families, in a New-World monkey, and in a prosimian primate attests to the antiquity of these sequences in primate evolution and to the sequence conservatism of a large class of mammalian highly repetitive DNA. In addition, the relative conservatism exhibited by these sequences may distinguish the alphoid DNAs from more recently evolved highly repetitive components and satellite DNAs which have a more restricted taxonomical distribution.