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Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on January 29, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(6):1809-1816; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp017
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 6 1809-1816
© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Genomics

Centromere sequence and dynamics in Dictyostelium discoideum

Gernot Glöckner* and Andrew J. Heidel

Leibniz Institute for Age Research - Fritz Lipmann Institute, Beutenbergstrasse 11, D-07745 Jena, Germany

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +49 3641 656440; Fax: +49 3641 656255; Email: gernot{at}fli-leibniz.de

Received November 20, 2008. Revised January 5, 2009. Accepted January 7, 2009.

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 Dictyostelium 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 organization 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 organization 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.


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