indel

Also known as insertion/deletion, indel mutation

Indel (insertion-deletion) is a molecular biology term for an insertion or deletion of bases in the genome of an organism. Indels ≥ 50 bases in length are classified as structural variants.

Research

12,630 papers

A redefined InDel taxonomy provides insights into mutational signatures.Nature genetics · 2025
INDEL detection, the 'Achilles heel' of precise genome editing: a survey of methods for accurate profiling of gene editing induced indels.Nucleic acids research · 2020
Statistical framework to determine indel-length distribution.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2024
Indel driven rapid evolution of core nuclear pore protein gene promoters.Scientific reports · 2023
ScanNeo: identifying indel-derived neoantigens using RNA-Seq data.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2019

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Indel (insertion-deletion) is a molecular biology term for an insertion or deletion of bases in the genome of an organism. Indels ≥ 50 bases in length are classified as structural variants.

In coding regions of the genome, unless the length of an indel is a multiple of 3, it will produce a frameshift mutation. For example, a common microindel which results in a frameshift causes Bloom syndrome in the Jewish or Japanese population. Indels can be contrasted with a point mutation. An indel inserts or deletes nucleotides from a sequence, while a point mutation is a form of substitution that replaces one of the nucleotides without changing the overall number in the DNA. Indels can also be contrasted with Tandem Base Mutations (TBM), which may result from fundamentally different mechanisms. A TBM is defined as a substitution at adjacent nucleotides (primarily substitutions at two adjacent nucleotides, but substitutions at three adjacent nucleotides have been observed).