A role for centromere pairing in meiotic chromosome segregation

  1. Benedict Kemp1,
  2. Rebecca Maxfield Boumil,
  3. Mara N. Stewart, and
  4. Dean S. Dawson2
  1. Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts 02111, USA

Abstract

In meiosis I, exchanges provide a connection between homologous chromosome pairs that facilitates their proper attachment to the meiotic spindle. In many eukaryotes, homologous chromosomes that fail to become linked by exchanges exhibit elevated levels of meiotic errors, but they do not segregate randomly, demonstrating that mechanisms beyond exchange can promote proper meiosis I segregation. The experiments described here demonstrate the existence of a meiotic centromere pairing mechanism in budding yeast. This centromere pairing mediates the meiosis I bipolar spindle attachment of nonexchange chromosome pairs and likely plays the same role for all homologous chromosome pairs.

Keywords

Footnotes

  • Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1227304.

  • Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.

  • ↵1 Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.

  • ↵2 Corresponding author. E-MAIL dean.dawson{at}tufts.edu; FAX (617) 636-0337.

    • Accepted June 16, 2004.
    • Received May 31, 2004.
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  1. Published in Advance August 2, 2004, doi: 10.1101/gad.1227304 Genes & Dev. 2004. 18: 1946-1951 Copyright © 2004, by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

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