Chantzi N, Georgakopoulos-Soares I.

The repertoire of short tandem repeats across the tree of life.

Genome Biol. 2025 Dec 12;26(1):425. doi:10.1186/s13059-025-03893-z

“The average STR density was 1.51 STR bp per kB” “Plasmodium falciparum shows the highest STR genomic density (109 bp/kB)” “19,645 viruses and 5 bacteria lacked STRs altogether” “the bacterial kingdom Fusobacteriati is depleted of STRs” “for prokaryotic genomes, we notice that one bp repeat unit STRs are highly depleted. Notably, trinucleotide and hexanucleotide tandem repeats are also enriched in most prokaryotic phyla” “bacterial and archaeal genomes are, on average, not more repetitive than expected by chance in contrast to eukaryotic and viral genomes.”