BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Repeat offenders

Chromatin structure could provide a unified 3-D key to repeat expansion diseases

September 14, 2018 1:50 AM UTC

Dozens of intractable DNA repeat-driven diseases could boil down to a common problem: disrupted boundaries between chromatin domains, according to a study from the University of Pennsylvania. The results present new opportunities for diseases like fragile X syndrome and Huntington’s disease, which until now have been tackled one by one on the basis of their individual mutations and pathologies.

About 30 diseases have been identified that arise in genes containing excessive copies of tandem repeat sequences, which are defined as a series of two or more DNA bases repeated back to back. ...