1. Centromere innovations within a mouse species.
- Author
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Gambogi CW, Pandey N, Dawicki-McKenna JM, Arora UP, Liskovykh MA, Ma J, Lamelza P, Larionov V, Lampson MA, Logsdon GA, Dumont BL, and Black BE
- Subjects
- Mice, Animals, Centromere genetics, Centromere metabolism, Centromere Protein A genetics, Nucleosomes, Mammals genetics, Chromosomal Proteins, Non-Histone genetics, Chromosomal Proteins, Non-Histone metabolism, Autoantigens
- Abstract
Mammalian centromeres direct faithful genetic inheritance and are typically characterized by regions of highly repetitive and rapidly evolving DNA. We focused on a mouse species, Mus pahari, that we found has evolved to house centromere-specifying centromere protein-A (CENP-A) nucleosomes at the nexus of a satellite repeat that we identified and termed π-satellite (π-sat), a small number of recruitment sites for CENP-B, and short stretches of perfect telomere repeats. One M. pahari chromosome, however, houses a radically divergent centromere harboring ~6 mega-base pairs of a homogenized π-sat-related repeat, π-sat
B , that contains >20,000 functional CENP-B boxes. There, CENP-B abundance promotes accumulation of microtubule-binding components of the kinetochore and a microtubule-destabilizing kinesin of the inner centromere. We propose that the balance of pro- and anti-microtubule binding by the new centromere is what permits it to segregate during cell division with high fidelity alongside the older ones whose sequence creates a markedly different molecular composition.- Published
- 2023
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