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.

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useful information is available at dictyBase - http://dictybase.org.

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Abstracts
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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]