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Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serves as a powerful model organism for advancing our understanding of biological processes, not just by studying its similarities with other organisms including ourselves but also by investigating its differences to unravel the underlying strategies that evolve...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Kyriacou, Eftychia, Heun, Patrick
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10697814/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37931172
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyad170
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author Kyriacou, Eftychia
Heun, Patrick
author_facet Kyriacou, Eftychia
Heun, Patrick
author_sort Kyriacou, Eftychia
collection PubMed
description The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serves as a powerful model organism for advancing our understanding of biological processes, not just by studying its similarities with other organisms including ourselves but also by investigating its differences to unravel the underlying strategies that evolved to achieve a common goal. This is particularly true for centromeres, specialized genomic regions present on all eukaryotic chromosomes that function as the platform for the assembly of kinetochores. These multiprotein structures play an essential role during cell division by connecting chromosomes to spindle microtubules in mitosis and meiosis to mediate accurate chromosome segregation. Here, we will take a historical perspective on the study of fly centromeres, aiming to highlight not only the important similarities but also the differences identified that contributed to advancing centromere biology. We will discuss the current knowledge on the sequence and chromatin organization of fly centromeres together with advances for identification of centromeric proteins. Then, we will describe both the factors and processes involved in centromere organization and how they work together to provide an epigenetic identity to the centromeric locus. Lastly, we will take an evolutionary point of view of centromeres and briefly discuss current views on centromere drive.
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spelling pubmed-106978142023-12-06 Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila Kyriacou, Eftychia Heun, Patrick Genetics FlyBook The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serves as a powerful model organism for advancing our understanding of biological processes, not just by studying its similarities with other organisms including ourselves but also by investigating its differences to unravel the underlying strategies that evolved to achieve a common goal. This is particularly true for centromeres, specialized genomic regions present on all eukaryotic chromosomes that function as the platform for the assembly of kinetochores. These multiprotein structures play an essential role during cell division by connecting chromosomes to spindle microtubules in mitosis and meiosis to mediate accurate chromosome segregation. Here, we will take a historical perspective on the study of fly centromeres, aiming to highlight not only the important similarities but also the differences identified that contributed to advancing centromere biology. We will discuss the current knowledge on the sequence and chromatin organization of fly centromeres together with advances for identification of centromeric proteins. Then, we will describe both the factors and processes involved in centromere organization and how they work together to provide an epigenetic identity to the centromeric locus. Lastly, we will take an evolutionary point of view of centromeres and briefly discuss current views on centromere drive. Oxford University Press 2023-11-01 /pmc/articles/PMC10697814/ /pubmed/37931172 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyad170 Text en © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Genetics Society of America. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle FlyBook
Kyriacou, Eftychia
Heun, Patrick
Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila
title Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila
title_full Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila
title_fullStr Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila
title_full_unstemmed Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila
title_short Centromere structure and function: lessons from Drosophila
title_sort centromere structure and function: lessons from drosophila
topic FlyBook
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10697814/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37931172
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyad170
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