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In molecular biology, [1] [2] [3] DNA replication is the biological process of producing two identical replicas of DNA from one original DNA molecule. [4] DNA replication occurs in all living organisms acting as the most essential part of biological inheritance .
During DNA replication, the replisome will unwind the parental duplex DNA into a two single-stranded DNA template replication fork in a 5' to 3' direction. The leading strand is the template strand that is being replicated in the same direction as the movement of the replication fork.
Slipped strand mispairing (SSM, also known as replication slippage) is a mutation process which occurs during DNA replication. It involves denaturation and displacement of the DNA strands, resulting in mispairing of the complementary bases. Slipped strand mispairing is one explanation for the origin and evolution of repetitive DNA sequences. [1]
When a DNA trinucleotide repeat sequence is damaged, it may be repaired by processes such as homologous recombination, non-homologous end joining, mismatch repair or base excision repair. Each of these processes involves a DNA synthesis step in which strand slippage might occur leading to trinucleotide repeat expansion. [4]
Tandem repeats can occur through different mechanisms. For example, slipped strand mispairing, (also known as replication slippage), is a mutation process which occurs during DNA replication. It involves denaturation and displacement of the DNA strands, resulting in mispairing of the complementary bases.
For example, if the 100th base of a nucleotide sequence mutated from G to C, then it would be written as g.100G>C if the mutation occurred in genomic DNA, m.100G>C if the mutation occurred in mitochondrial DNA, or r.100g>c if the mutation occurred in RNA. Note that, for mutations in RNA, the nucleotide code is written in lower case.
Occasionally, within a sample of individuals such as in paternity testing casework, a mutation in the DNA flanking the microsatellite can prevent the PCR primer from binding and producing an amplicon (creating a "null allele" in a gel assay), thus only one allele is amplified (from the non-mutated sister chromosome), and the individual may then ...
At some point during the replication process, the polymerase dissociates from the DNA and replication stalls. When the polymerase reattaches to the DNA strand, it aligns the replicating strand to an incorrect position and incidentally copies the same section more than once. Replication slippage is also often facilitated by repetitive sequences ...