Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
Polymorphism of the human MUC genes
Mucins encoded by the MUC genes share the common feature of having an extensive tandem repeat region that encompasses a large proportion of the coding sequence. In many of the genes this tandem repeat region shows a great deal of allelic length variation and recently studies have demonstrated person to person variation in pattern of nucleotide or amino-acid changes in the repeat units. The length and sequence variability will be discussed in this review, as will its role in disease susceptibility.