This proposal seeks to study fundamental questions concerning mutation and recombination events that lead to human disease.
One aim i s to determine whether expansions of the CAT/CTG tracts found in Huntington disease patients occur in germline mitotic cells or following the initiation of meiosis. Studies are also proposed to examine whether the proximity or orientation of a CAG/CTG tract relative to an origin of DNA replication influences expansion size or frequency and whether this accounts for the marked inter-locus variation in expansion mutation susceptibility. Two other aims also focus on mutation.
One aim will examine human sperm to determine whether the mutation that causes achondroplasia, the most common cause of dwarfism, increases with the age of the father as predicted by population studies. Another will examine the role played by members of the MutL DNA repair protein family on mononucleotide repeat slippage mutations. In humans this kind of mutation has been shown to inactivate important genes in many tumors from patients with the a familial colon cancer (HNPCC). The last aim seeks to directly measure the effects of sequence length and sequence similarity on the frequency of unequal recombination between repeated sequences in the human genome. Such events have been shown to lead to a variety of human disease syndromes.
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