IDENTIFICATION AND MAPPING OF 26 HUMAN TESTIS MESSENGER-RNAS CONTAINING CAG CTG REPEATS/

Various types of pathologies, including neurodegenerative diseases, as well as different types of neoplasia, are related to genes exhibiting simple tandem repeat instabilities. In order to seek for new candidat e genes for such disorders, we screened 4.10(6) human testis cDNAs for CAG- and CTG-containing clones. Among 910 positive clones, we charact erized 109 cDNAs corresponding to 26 independent mRNAs. Fourteen of th ese mRNAs represent new genes. The corresponding clones contain betwee n 3 and 19 consecutive CAG or CTG triplets. We assigned 15 out of thes e 26 genes to 14 different human chromosomes. These genes represent ne w potential candidates for diseases associated with CAG or CTG repeat mutations.