Skip to main content
Advertisement
  • Loading metrics

PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 3(11) November 2007

Trinucleotide disease as a genetic time bomb

A trinucleotide disease is like a genetic time bomb. A patient with such a disease inherits a DNA region consisting of a three-letter code repeated abnormally many times. The age at which the disease strikes the patient is encoded by the number of repeats. A universal mechanism by which this molecular time bomb operates in this broad family of hereditary diseases has been suggested (see Kaplan et al, e235).

Image Credit: Genia Brodsky, Weizmann Institute of Science

thumbnail
Trinucleotide disease as a genetic time bomb

A trinucleotide disease is like a genetic time bomb. A patient with such a disease inherits a DNA region consisting of a three-letter code repeated abnormally many times. The age at which the disease strikes the patient is encoded by the number of repeats. A universal mechanism by which this molecular time bomb operates in this broad family of hereditary diseases has been suggested (see Kaplan et al, e235).

Image Credit: Genia Brodsky, Weizmann Institute of Science

https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pcbi.v03.i11.g001