MIR: Family of repeats common to vertebrate genomes

We studied the occurrence of mammalian interspersed repeats (MIRs) in DNA a nd RNA of vertebrates, invertebrates, and bacteria using the data from GenB ank. A special algorithm based on a weight position matrix with optimal ali gnment using dynamic programming was developed to search for the traces of MIR dissemination. This allowed us to search for highly divergent MIRs carr ying deletions and insertions. MIRs were detected in genomes of various fis hes, including Latimeria. This suggests that the origin of MIRs dates back more than 400 million years. The method to search for similarity between hi ghly divergent sequences may be used to find the genome fragments from vari ous ancient repeat families and from various gene families.