Anniversary of the discovery/isolation of the yeast centromere by Clarke and Carbon

ABSTRACT The first centromere was isolated 35 years ago by Louise Clarke and John Car-bon from budding yeast. They embarked on their journey with rudimentary molecular tools (by today’s standards) and little knowledge of the structure of a chromosome, much less the nature of a centromere. Their discovery opened up a new field, as centromeres have now been isolated from fungi and numerous plants and animals, including mammals. Budding yeast and several other fungi have small centromeres with short, well-defined sequences, known as point centromeres, whereas regional centromeres span several kilobases up to megabases and do not seem to have DNA sequence specificity. Centromeres are at the heart of artificial chromosomes, and we have seen the birth of synthetic centromeres in budding and fission yeast and mammals. The diversity in centromeres throughout phylogeny belie conserved functions that are only beginning to be understood. It was ∼35 years ago that centromere DNA was first discovered by Louise Clarke and John Carbon working at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Clarke and Carbon, 1980, 1985). To ap-preciate the pioneering aspect of this work, it is important to con