Over a length of 20 base pairs, you find an almost exact repetition of base pairs in complementary order. Why is this?

Okay, so you know that the DNA is made up of many small building blocks called base pairs. There are four different types of base pairs, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, and each type fits only to a certain other type. Adenin fits thymine and cytosine fits guinea.

Now, if you find 20 base pairs in succession on a DNA chain, which are exactly the same and in the same order as their counterpart on the other DNA chain, then this is a hint that it is a so-called “Palindrome”. A Palindrom is a word or sequence that is read from behind as it looks like read from the front.

In DNA chains, it may happen that these palindromes form and if they are long enough, they can cause problems because they can, for example, influence the replication of the DNA or bring the repair mechanisms of the DNA together. There are also special proteins that dock on such palindromes and regulate certain processes in the cell.

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