The mysterious case of biological dark matter and human uniqueness

Project summary

The vast majority of our DNA code is full of segments that are repeated multiple times and do not contain genes. So far scientists have been largely ignoring them because they were difficulty to read. Yet, we know that in principle they can change or expand and influence disease. In this project, researchers develop novel laboratory and computational methods to accurately read both the sequence and chemical profile of long DNA repeats. They then employ them to study their variation between several tissues of unrelated individuals and identical twins, to uncover the truth behind the uniqueness of repetitive DNA.