Gene regulation by long purine tracks in brain related diseases

Purine repeats are randomly distributed in the human genome, however, they show potential role in the transcriptional deregulation of genes. Presence of long tracks of purine repeats in the genome can disturb its integrity and interfere with the cellular behavior by introducing mutations and/or triple stranded structure formation in DNA. Our data revealed interesting finding that a majority of genes carrying purine repeats, of length n≥200, were down regulated and found to be linked with several brain related diseases [1]. The unique feature of the purine repeats found in the present study clearly manifests their significant application in developing therapeutics for neurological diseases.