dictyNews Volume 32 Number 02

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Dicty News

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

Please submit abstracts of your papers as soon as they have been 
accepted for publication by sending them to dicty@northwestern.edu 
or by using the form at 
http://dictybase.org/db/cgi-bin/dictyBase/abstract_submit. 

Back issues of dictyNews, the Dicty Reference database and other 
useful information is available at dictyBase - http://dictybase.org. 

========= 
Abstracts 
========= 

 

Centromere Sequence and Dynamics in Dictyostelium discoideum 

 
Gernot Gloeckner* 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 Gloeckner [gernot@fli-leibniz.de] 
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[End dictyNews, volume 32, number 2]