text: One of the most well known examples of a short copy number variation is the trinucleotide repeat of the CAG base pairs in the huntingtin gene responsible for the neurological disorder Huntingtons disease. For this particular case, once the CAG trinucleotide repeats more than 36 times in a trinucleotide repeat expansion, Huntingtons disease will likely develop in the individual and it will likely be inherited by his or her offspring. The number of repeats of the CAG trinucleotide is inversely correlated with the age of onset of Huntingtons disease. These types of short repeats are often thought to be due to errors in polymerase activity during replication including polymerase slippage, template switching, and fork switching which will be discussed in detail later. The short repeat size of these copy number variations lends itself to errors in the polymerase as these repeated regions are prone to misrecognition by the polymerase and replicated regions may be replicated again, leading to extra copies of the repeat. In addition, if these trinucleotide repeats are in the same reading frame in the coding portion of a gene, it may lead to a long chain of the same amino acid, possibly creating protein aggregates in the cell, and if these short repeats fall into the non-coding portion of the gene, it may affect gene expression and regulation. On the other hand, a variable number of repeats of entire genes is less commonly identified in the genome. One example of a whole gene repeat is the alpha-amylase 1 gene (AMY1) that encodes alpha-amylase which has a significant copy number variation between different populations with different diets. Although the specific mechanism that allows the AMY1 gene to increase or decrease its copy number is still a topic of debate, some hypotheses suggest that the non-homologous end joining or the microhomology-mediated end joining is likely responsible for these whole gene repeats. Repeats of entire genes has immediate effects on expression of that particular gene, and the fact that the copy number variation of the AMY1' gene has been related to diet is a remarkable example of recent human evolutionary adaptation. Although these are the general groups that copy number variations are grouped into, the exact number of base pairs copy number variations affect depends on the specific loci of interest. Currently, using data from all reported copy number variations, the mean size of copy number variant is around 118kb, and the median is around 18kb.
  In terms of the structural architecture of copy number variations, research has suggested and defined hotspot regions in the genome where copy number variations are four times more enriched. These hotspot regions were defined to be regions containing long repeats that are 90–100% similar known as segmental duplications either tandem or interspersed and most importantly, these hotspot regions have an increased rate of chromosomal rearrangement. It was thought that these large-scale chromosomal rearrangements give rise to normal variation and genetic diseases, including copy number variations. Moreover, these copy number variation hotspots are consistent throughout many populations from different continents, implying that these hotspots were either independently acquired by all the populations and passed on through generations, or they were acquired in early human evolution before the populations split, the latter seems more likely. Lastly, spatial biases of the location at which copy number variations are most densely distributed does not seem to occur in the genome. Although it was originally detected by fluorescent in situ hybridization and microsatellite analysis that copy number repeats are localized to regions that are highly repetitive such as telomeres, centromeres, and heterochromatin, recent genome-wide studies have concluded otherwise. Namely, the subtelomeric regions and pericentromeric regions are where most chromosomal rearrangement hotspots are found, and there is no considerable increase in copy number variations in that region. Furthermore, these regions of chromosomal rearrangement hotspots do not have decreased gene numbers, again, implying that there is minimal spatial bias of the genomic location of copy number variations.