Recent advances in minisatellite biology.

Highly polymorphic tandemly repeated 'minisatellite' loci are very abundant in the human genome, and of considerable utility in human genetic analysis. This review describes the use of an ordered-array Charomid library in the systematic and efficient cloning of these regions, and in the analysis of the relative overlap between the different probes used to screen for hypervariable loci. Recent work on the process of mutation leading to the generation of new-length alleles is also discussed, including the observation that at least some mutations may be due to unequal exchanges.