Prevalence of quadruplexes in the human genome

Guanine-rich DNA sequences of a particular form have the ability to fold into four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. In this paper, we present a working rule to predict which primary sequences can form this structure, and describe a search algorithm to identify such sequences in genomic DNA. We count the number of quadruplexes found in the human genome and compare that with the figure predicted by modelling DNA as a Bernoulli stream or as a Markov chain, using windows of various sizes. We demonstrate that the distribution of loop lengths is significantly different from what would be expected in a random case, providing an indication of the number of potentially relevant quadruplex-forming sequences. In particular, we show that there is a significant repression of quadruplexes in the coding strand of exonic regions, which suggests that quadruplex-forming patterns are disfavoured in sequences that will form RNA.

• Publication year

  2005

• Venue

  Nucleic Acids Research

• Publication date

  2005-05-24

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/NAR/GKI609PMID 15914667PMCID 1140081
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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