Abstract

Every eukaryotic chromosome has a centromere, a locus responsible for poleward movement at mitosis and meiosis. Despite the essential function of centromere regions, many key centromeric proteins and the underlying DNA sequences are not conserved, and have been reported to be able to evolve rapidly – which is referred to as the ‘centromere paradox’. However, a complete understanding of centromere function and evolution has been limited, primarily due to these regions being highly repetitive and a lack of fully assembled centromeric sequences in many species. Recent advances in long read DNA sequencing provide an opportunity to map and understand the structure of centromeres for the first time. This talk will present work from our ongoing project to utilise Nanopore sequencing to map across the Arabidopsis thaliana centromeres, to investigate the genetic and epigenetic landscape of these regions.