Genomic substitutions of centromeres in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

The centromere region of yeast chromosome III has been investigated by altering it in vivo. Deleting the functional centromere (CEN3) sequence leads to extreme instability of the resulting acentric chromosome. Inversion of CEN3, or its replacement by chromosome XI centromere DNA (CEN11) has no measurable effect on the mitotic and meiotic behaviour of chromosome III, suggesting that yeast centromeres are not chromosome-specific, and are fully functional in either orientation.