title: Alu repeats and human genomic diversity.
abstract: During the past 65 million years, Alu elements have propagated to more than one million copies in primate genomes, which has resulted in the generation of a series of Alu subfamilies of different ages. Alu elements affect the genome in several ways, causing insertion mutations, recombination between elements, gene conversion and alterations in gene expression. Alu-insertion polymorphisms are a boon for the study of human population genetics and primate comparative genomics because they are neutral genetic markers of identical descent with known ancestral states.
authors: Department of Biological Sciences, Biological Computation and Visualization Center, Louisiana State University, 202 Life Sciences Building, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, USA. mbatzer@lsu.edu
authors: Mark A
authors: MA
authors: Batzer
authors: Prescott L
authors: PL
authors: Deininger
mesh_terms: D020087:Alu Elements / Q000235:genetics*; D001483:Base Sequence; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005785:Gene Conversion; D014644:Genetic Variation; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011110:Polymorphism, Genetic; D011995:Recombination, Genetic; D018626:Retroelements / Q000235:genetics; D016415:Sequence Alignment
chemical_list: D018626:Retroelements