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A family of dispersed repeats in Mycobacterium leprae
Author(s) -
Woods S. A.,
Cole S. T.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
molecular microbiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.857
H-Index - 247
eISSN - 1365-2958
pISSN - 0950-382X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2958.1990.tb00552.x
Subject(s) - biology , mycobacterium leprae , genetics , insertion sequence , sequence (biology) , nucleic acid sequence , genome , inverted repeat , polymerase chain reaction , repeated sequence , direct repeat , sequence analysis , consensus sequence , leprosy , base sequence , transposable element , dna , gene , immunology
Summary The genome of the causative agent of leprosy, Mycobacterium leprae , contains at least 28 copies of a dispersed repetitive sequence, RLEP. From nucleotide sequence analysis it was clear that the RLEP element consists of a 545 bp central domain flanked by a 100bp left‐end and a 44bp right‐end, sometimes associated with a 47bp extension. The presence of the left and right ends is variable and this allowed three different RLEP configurations to be defined. When the polymerase chain reaction was used to study variation of the central region at least twelve different classes were detected, suggesting that no two RLEP sequences may be identical. Furthermore, they have few features in common with classical bacterial insertion sequences.