Sequence relationships between single repeat units of highly reiterated African Green monkey DNA

Abstract

Individual monomer and dimer units of the highly repeated alpha-component DNA of African Green monkeys were isolated and amplified by molecular cloning in pBR322. The purified sequences were characterized by digestion with restriction endonucleases and by primary nucleotide sequence analysis. Comparison of the cloned units with the 172 base pair long sequence representing the most abundant nucleotide at each position in the set of sequences comprising alpha-component allows the following conclusions. The set of sequences comprising alpha-component is made up of a very large number of related but slightly divergent sequences. Two neighboring repeats of the monomer unit are not necessarily more similar to one another than are randomly isolated monomers.