articlePLoS GeneticsDec 1, 2011GOLD OA

Repetitive Elements May Comprise Over Two-Thirds of the Human Genome

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus · University of Colorado Denver · +1 more institution

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Abstract

Transposable elements (TEs) are conventionally identified in eukaryotic genomes by alignment to consensus element sequences. Using this approach, about half of the human genome has been previously identified as TEs and low-complexity repeats. We recently developed a highly sensitive alternative de novo strategy, P-clouds, that instead searches for clusters of high-abundance oligonucleotides that are related in sequence space (oligo "clouds"). We show here that P-clouds predicts >840 Mbp of additional repetitive sequences in the human genome, thus suggesting that 66%-69% of the human genome is repetitive or repeat-derived. To investigate this remarkable difference, we conducted detailed analyses of the ability…

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