| First Author | Gambogi CW | Year | 2023 |
| Journal | Sci Adv | Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 46 | Pages | eadi5764 |
| PubMed ID | 37967185 | Mgi Jnum | J:352179 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:7550073 | Doi | 10.1126/sciadv.adi5764 |
| Citation | Gambogi CW, et al. (2023) Centromere innovations within a mouse species. Sci Adv 9(46):eadi5764 |
| abstractText | 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 pi-satellite (pi-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 pi-sat-related repeat, pi-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. |
