The Chinese hamster () and striped hamster () are very closely related species with similar karyotypes. The karyotypes differ from each other by one Robertsonian rearrangement and X-chromosome morphology. The level of the tandem repeat (TR) sequences' evolutional variability is high.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Chromocenters are defined as a punctate condensed blocks of chromatin in the interphase cell nuclei of certain cell types with unknown biological significance. In recent years a progress in revealing of chromocenters protein content has been made although the details of DNA content within constitutive heterochromatin still remain unclear. It is known that these regions are enriched in tandem repeats (TR) and transposable elements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChromocenters are interphase nuclear landmark structures of constitutive heterochromatin. The tandem repeat (TR)-enriched parts of different chromosomes cluster together in chromocenters. There has been progress in recent years in determining the protein content of chromocenters, although it is not clear which DNA sequences underly constitutive heterochromatin apart from the TRs.
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