1 Arabidopsis Centromeres 拟南芥着丝粒.pdf

Plant Centromere Biology 1 Arabidopsis Centromeres Minoru Murata Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. is an annual fl owering plant belonging to the family Brassicaceae. Since it has quite a small genome size and low amount of repetitive DNA sequences (see Mey- erowitz, 1992 , for the early history of the genome size estimation), it has become a model for molecular biological studies. Hence, its genome was the fi rst among plant species to be sequenced (Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, 2000 ). This species has fi ve pairs of chromosomes (2 n = 2 x = 10; Figure 1.1 a), which is less than the chromosome number possessed by closely related species such as A. lyrata (2 n = 2 x = 16) and A. arenosa ( Cardaminopsis arenosa ; 2 n = 2 x = 16). A. suecica (2n = 4 x = 26) is an allotetraploid between A. thaliana and A. arenosa (Jakobsson et al., 2006 ). Chromosome size, which is highly related to genome size, has made cytological analysis diffi cult in Arabidopsis species. Nevertheless, it is very surprising that the fi rst accurate report regarding the chromosome number (2 n = 10 for A. thaliana ) was made in 1907 (Laibach, 1907 ). Although the properties that made this plant suitable for genetic studies have been recognized for more than half a century (cf. Redei, 1992 ), the cytogenetical approach had been quite limited until Sears ’ s work (Steinitz-Sears, 1963 ; Sears and Lee-Chen, 1970 ). They assumed that the centromeres are located in or adjacent to the heterochromatic regions. Ambros and Schweizer ( 1976 ) applied Giemsa C-banding and confi rmed that the centromeric regions of all chromosomes are heterochro- matic. However, no DNA components of the centromeres had been revealed for a decade. Centromere DNA structure, 5 Cytosine methylation and heterochromatin, 6 Centromere proteins, 6 Functional domains, 9 Future prospects and conclusions, 11 Acknowledgments, 11 References, 11 Plant Centromere Biology, First Edition