[2] A slippage event normally occurs when a sequence of repetitive nucleotides (tandem repeats) are found at the site of replication.
If these repeats are found in coding regions then the variations to the polynucleotide sequence can result in the formation of abnormal proteins in eukaryotes.
These disorders can lead to a severe impact on an individual's daily activities, making it hard for proper communication and independent actions to take place.
[7] Therefore, replication slippage leads to a form of trinucleotide expansion which results in serious changes to protein structure.
Insertions are thought to be self-accelerating: as repeats grow longer, the probability of subsequent mispairing events increases.
[5] The combination of SSM events with point mutation is thought to account for the evolution of more complex repeat units.
Simple repetitive DNA sequences containing a variety of adjacent short tandem repeats are commonly observed in non-protein coding regions of eukaryotic genomes.