Recent advances in plant centromere biology

Abstract

The centromere, which is one of the essential parts of a chromosome, controls kinetochore formation and chromosome segregation during mitosis and meiosis. While centromere function is conserved in eukaryotes, the centromeric DNA sequences evolve rapidly and have few similarities among species. The histone H3 variant CENH3 (CENP-A in human), which mostly exists in centromeric nucleosomes, is a universal active centromere mark in eukaryotes and plays an essential role in centromere identity determination. The relationship between centromeric DNA sequences and centromere identity determination is one of the intriguing questions in studying centromere formation. Due to the discoveries in the past decades, including "neocentromeres" and "centromere inactivation", it is now believed that the centromere identity is determined by epigenetic mechanisms. This review will present recent progress in plant centromere biology. centromere, epigenetics, CENH3

Wavelet-Based Genomic Signal Processing for Centromere Identification and Hypothesis Generation

“…The centromere is an important chromosomal structure which controls the segregation of chromosomes during cell division, and is the location for the assembly for the kinetochore protein complex (O'Connor, 2008; Feng et al, 2015). Centromeric chromatin contains a histone H3 variant specific to the centromere (CENH3), which has been found in many organisms, including plants (Talbert et al, 2002).…”

“…Centromeric regions can vary in size, and can be small regions consisting of only one nucleosome, such as in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Furuyama and Biggins, 2007; Feng et al, 2015), while plant centromeric regions are large (Mb scale), and consist of repetitive sequences (Mehrotra and Goyal, 2014; Feng et al, 2015). Centromeres also have epigenetic characteristics in that plant centromeric regions have been found to be relatively highly methylated (Zhang et al, 2006; Vining et al, 2012).…”

Technology-enabled great leap in deciphering plant genomes

“…centromere). Centromere is one of the important components of chromosomes and plays a key role in mitosis and meiosis 40 . Unfortunately, due to highly repetitive sequences and complex structures, centromeric regions have been rarely explored 41 .…”

Characterization of the CsCENH3 protein and centromeric DNA profiles reveal the structures of centromeres in cucumber

“…CENH3 has a variable N-terminus, but its C-terminus is highly conserved [ 6 , 7 ]. During cell division, only nucleosomes containing the CENH3 protein can become dynein aggregation sites to form the kinetochore [ 8 , 9 ]. CENH3 can decipher centromeric DNA sequences because it binds exclusively to centromeric DNA [ 10 ].…”