Plant Cell, February 1st, 2003
INSIGHT
Centromeres evolve rapidly and display a remarkable lack of sequence conservation (Henikoff et al., 2001). They can be small (125 bp in Saccharomyces cerevisiae) or large (9 million bp in maize) and show a relatively ordered arrangement of long repeats (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) or a wider array of small repeats interrupted by transposable elements (humans, Drosophila, and plants) (Choo, 1997). In addition, much of the DNA at centromeres appears to be unnecessary for function. There are many examples from both plants and animals to illustrate the impressive plasticity of centromeres,...
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