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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Evolution Of Long Centromeres In Fire Ants, Yu-Ching Huang, Chih-Chi Lee, Chia-Yi Kao, Ni-Chen Chang, Chung-Chi Lin, Dewayne Shoemaker, John Wang
Evolution Of Long Centromeres In Fire Ants, Yu-Ching Huang, Chih-Chi Lee, Chia-Yi Kao, Ni-Chen Chang, Chung-Chi Lin, Dewayne Shoemaker, John Wang
Entomology & Plant Pathology Publications and Other Works
Background: Centromeres are essential for accurate chromosome segregation, yet sequence conservation is low even among closely related species. Centromere drive predicts rapid turnover because some centromeric sequences may compete better than others during female meiosis. In addition to sequence composition, longer centromeres may have a transmission advantage.
Results: We report the first observations of extremely long centromeres, covering on average 34 % of the chromosomes, in the red imported fire ant Solenopsis invicta. By comparison, cytological examination of Solenopsis geminata revealed typical small centromeric constrictions. Bioinformatics and molecular analyses identified CenSol, the major centromeric satellite DNA repeat. We found that …