The scientists, who are affiliated with the University of
Washington (Seattle, WA), Case Western Reserve University
(Cleveland, OH), the University of Bari (Bari, Italy),
Washington University (St. Louis, MO), Washington State
University (Pullman, WA), and Duke University (Durham, NC),
report their findings online today in the journal Genome
Research. Dr. Evan E. Eichler, Associate Professor of Genome
Sciences at the University of Washington, heads the team.
"Primate genomic sequence comparisons are becoming useful for
elucidating the evolutionary history and organization of our own
genome," he explains. "Such studies are particularly informative
within human pericentromeric regions ?areas of rapid change in
genomic structure." Pericentromeric regions are sequences of DNA
that lie in close proximity to the centromere, which plays a
critical role in chromosomal separation during cell division.
Pericentromeric regions contain an abundance of segmental
duplications, which are large DNA sequences that exhibit str