Introduction
In the late 1930s, while America was suffering through the great depression and Europe was appeasing Nazi Germany, two geneticists were shedding light on the remarkable segments of DNA found at the end of eukaryotic chromosomes. Barbara McClintock, a maize cytogeneticist at the University of Missouri, followed the fate of broken chromosomes. McClintock observed the phenomenon of anaphase bridges created when a chromosome with two centromeres (dicentric chromosome), connected by heterochromatin, attempted to segregate and was pulled in opposite directions during meiosis I. These chromosomes would eventually break, and the broken sister chromatids would subsequently fuse to generate a new dicentric chromosome (discussed further below). Then the cycle of breakage-fusion-bridge formation would repeat itself. Importantly, McClintock noticed that in some cell lines, rather than undergoing fusion events, the ends of broken chromosomes would “heal” themselves and generate new...
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Further Reading
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Nelson, A.D.L., Beilstein, M.A., Shippen, D.E. (2013). Nucleus and Genome: Telomeres. In: Howell, S. (eds) Molecular Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0263-7_4-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0263-7_4-1
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