About this page

When analysing microsatellite data the two alleles may overlap and produce a composite set of stutter peaks. This page shows a number of images that show how the peaks interact. In the first image the individual is homozygous and in subsequent images the alleles differ by 2bps more than the previous image.

The page only considers situations where the size difference is due to differences in the dinucleotide repeat length. It is possible for two alleles to differ by an odd number of nucleotides, since this is rare it is no covered on this web page. However an excel spread sheet used to create these image can be downloaded here, which does contain images of alleles that differ by an odd number of bases.

Allele size difference	Image	Allele size difference	Image
Homozygous		+2bp
+4bp		+6bp
+8bp		+10bp
+12bp