Sankaranarayanan SR, Ianiri G, Coelho MA, Reza MH, Thimmappa BC, Ganguly P, Vadnala RN, Sun S, Siddharthan R, Tellgren-Roth C, Dawson TL Jnr, Heitman J, Sanyal K.

Elife. 2020 Jan 20;9. pii: e53944. doi: 10.7554/eLife.53944 doi:10.7554/eLife.53944

Loss of centromere function drives karyotype evolution in closely related Malassezia species.

Hypothetises that AT-richness at centromeres can trigger breaks, and structural changes. Centromeres detected by ChIP-seq on GFP-Mtw1 in M. sympodialis. ”PhyloGibbs-MP predicted a 12 bp long AT-rich 239 motif common to all of the centromere sequences.” “In each chromosome, the centromere region shows between 7 and 13 motif matches, while no other 500 bp window shows more than 3 matches.” “In the absence of any centromere exclusive DNA sequence, the unique and distinguishing features of centromere regions in M. sympodialis are an AT-rich core region of <1 kb [...] enriched with the 12 bp motif in a kinetochore protein-bound region of 3 to 5 kb [containing] a reduced level of histone H3.” “Syntenic regions of all 8 M. sympodialis centromeres are present in the genomes of M. globosa and M. slooffiae [(each carries 9 chromosomes)].” “In the case of M. restricta, 7 putative centromeres are completely syntenic with M. sympodialis centromeres and one centromere retained partial gene synteny.” “No gene synteny conservation was observed at the centromeres of Chr2 in M. globosa, Chr5 in M. slooffiae, or Chr8 in M. restricta, indicative of loss of a centromere during the transition from the 9-chromosome state to the 8-302 chromosome state.”