Research led by scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have identified sequence-level changes within short tandem repeats (STRs) that appear to influence phenotypic variation within diseases and helps explain why some treatments for diseases work better for some patients than others. The findings, published in Genome Biology , could have implications for the treatment of diseases known to be caused by tandem repeats including Huntington’s disease .

“These changes in STR composition aren’t rare, they’re a normal part of human genetic diversity. This is a new dimension of genetic variation that’s been hiding in plain sight,” said senior author Ryan Yuen, PhD, a senior scientist at SickKids.

Tandem repeats are repeated sections of DNA strands and make up roughly seven

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