Sequence and analysis of chromosome 4 of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana

It has been possible to identify the sequence of chromosome 4 of the higher plant Arabidopsis thaliana. This chromosome is ecrocentric, with a shorter arm tipped by near-homogeneous ribosomal DNA repeats reaching for 3.5 Mb to the telomere. The complete sequence of 19,360,101 bp occurs in three contigs. Of these, two represent the short and long arms while the third, smaller one is found in the centromeric heterochromatin. The centromeric heterochromatin region of the chromosome was mapped cytogenetically to an approximately 4 Mb interval.