Practice question

Microsatellites consist of 1-6 base pair motifs tandemly repeated 5-50 times, dispersed throughout eukaryotic genomes. DNA polymerase slippage during replication creates extensive length polymorphism, making them multiallelic and highly informative. In molecular marker terminology, this class is designated as Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) and Short Tandem Repeats (STR), whereas VNTR refers to minisatellites of 10-100 bp. SNPs involve single-base substitutions and ESTs are partial cDNA sequences. Thus microsatellite nomenclature aligns with STR, widely applied in forensic profiling and genetic mapping.