Trinucleotide repeat (TNR) expansions are the underlying cause of more than 40 neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases, including myotonic dystrophy and Huntington's disease, yet the pathway to expansion remains poorly understood. An important step in expansion is the shift from a stable TNR sequence to an unstable, expanding tract, which is thought to occur once a TNR attains a threshold length. Modeling of human data has indicated that TNR tracts are increasingly likely to expand as they increase in size and to do so in increments that are smaller than the repeat itself, but this has not been tested experimentally. Genetic work has implicated the mismatch repair factor MSH3 in promoting expansions. Using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model for CAG and CTG tract dynamics, we examined individual threshold-length TNR tracts in vivo over time in MSH3 and msh3D backgrounds. We demonstrate, for the first time, that these TNR tracts are highly dynamic. Furthermore, we establish that once such a tract has expanded by even a few repeat units, it is significantly more likely to expand again. Finally, we show that threshold-length TNR sequences readily accumulate net incremental expansions over time through a series of small expansion and contraction events. Importantly, the tracts were substantially stabilized in the msh3D background, with a bias toward contractions, indicating that Msh2-Msh3 plays an important role in shifting the expansioncontraction equilibrium toward expansion in the early stages of TNR tract expansion.KEYWORDS Saccharomyces cerevisiae; Msh2-Msh3; mismatch repair; trinucleotide repeat tract T HE EXPANSION of trinucleotide repeat (TNR) sequences is the underlying cause of over 40 neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases (Castel et al. 2010;McMurray 2010). TNR sequences made of (CNG) n repeats are of particular interest because of their role in causing Huntington's disease (HD) and myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), as well as a number of other diseases (McMurray 2010). TNR tracts within the normal range (which is tract dependent) are stably maintained within that range (Figure 1). However, through a mechanism(s) that remains unclear, a TNR tract can expand, increasing the number of repeats within the tract. Initially, this brings the tract into a threshold-length range (Gannon et al. 2012;Concannon and Lahue 2014) (Figure 1 and Figure 2), in which these somewhat longer tracts are not pathogenic but are increasingly susceptible to expansion; individuals with this phenomenon are carriers for disease. Once a tract has expanded sufficiently, it crosses a threshold; tracts above this threshold (which is disease specific) are pathogenic and cause disease ( Figure 1). As the size of the tract increases, it becomes increasingly unstable and prone to changes in length, particularly expansions.The dynamic behavior of TNR tracts that are within the threshold range (i.e., more susceptible to expansions) and the manner in which they occur in vivo remain unclear. Studies of TNR tract length changes...