Presence of a highly repetitive and widely dispersed DNA sequence in the human genome.

A genomic DNA library consisting of human DNA fragments about 18 kilobases long cloned in a bacteriophage lambda vector was found to contain a specific repeated DNA segment. The repeated sequence is present in greater than 95% of the genomic library, and selected clones contain at least two copies of the sequence. Our experiments indicate that this highly repetitive sequence (approximately 400,000 copies per haploid genome) is widely distributed in the human genome and is represented in the cytoplasmic polysomal mRNA. This sequence is homologous to the 300-base-pair Alu repeat family, the predominant repeat sequence in man.