dictyNews
Electronic Edition
Volume 32, number 2
January 23, 2009

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Abstracts
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Centromere Sequence and Dynamics in Dictyostelium discoideum


Gernot Glöckner* and Andrew J. Heidel
*Corresponding author


Nucleic Acids Research, in press

Centromeres play a pivotal role in the life of a eukaryote cell.
perform an essential and conserved function, but this has not led
to a standard centromere structure. It remains currently unclear,
how the centromeric function is achieved by widely differing
structures. Since centromeres are often large and consist mainly
of repetitive sequences they have only been analyzed in great
detail in a handful of organisms. The genome of D. discoideum a
valuable model organism was described a few years ago but its
centromere organization remained largely unclear. Using available
sequence information we reconstructed the putative centromere
organisation in three of the six chromosomes of D. discoideum.
They mainly consist of one type of transposons that is confined
to centromeric regions. Centromeres are dynamic due to transposon
integration, but an optimal centromere size seems to exist in
D. discoideum. One centromere probably has expanded recently,
whereas another underwent major rearrangements. In addition to
insights into the centromere organisation and dynamics of a
protist eukaryote, this work also provides a starting point for
the analysis of the evolution of centromere structures in
social amoebas by comparative genomics.

Submitted by: Gernot Glöckner [[log in to unmask]]
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