Genetic Marker

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Encyclopedia of Systems Biology
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Synonyms

Genetic variation; Polymorphism

Definition

Genetic markers are detectable variations of DNA sequence with known chromosome locations. A genetic marker may or may not have a biological function. Each possible state among the various number of genetic variants is an allele. The chromosome location of a genetic marker is referred to as a locus. A polymorphism is a genetic variant that appears in at least 1% of the population.

Genetic variations can occur at many different DNA length scales, such as single nucleotide base, oligonucleotides, and long segment of bases. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a single base variant, microsatellite markers involve various number of repeats of short DNA sequences (2–6 nucleotides), insertion–deletion variant and inversion variants may cover a range of ∼10 bases, and copy number variants occur at between multiple of 103 bases (kb) and multiple of 106 bases (Mb).

The names of genetic markers are yet to be standardized. However, copy...

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Correspondence to Wentian Li .

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Li, W. (2013). Genetic Marker. In: Dubitzky, W., Wolkenhauer, O., Cho, KH., Yokota, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9863-7_227

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