Claim · model-written summary
Thirteen repeat-sensitive genome assemblies of maize and its recent ancestor teosinte were generated.
Zea maysVerbatim
t0“maize”
e0“we generate 13 repeat-sensitive genome assemblies of maize and its recent ancestor, teosinte”
Title
Higher order repeat structures reflect diverging evolutionary paths in maize centromeres and knobs
Rebecca D. Piri; Mingyu Wang; M. Cinta Romay; et al. Genome biology 2026. doi:10.1186/s13059-026-03993-4
Other claims from this paper (9)
- Method / resource A new graph-based pipeline, HiReNET, was developed to classify higher-order repeats and was shown to work in Arabidopsis and maize.
- Observation Higher-order repeats are ubiquitous in maize satellites but are typically low-frequency with small patterns.
- Observation About 38% of centromeric CentC monomers in maize occur in higher-order repeats.
- Observation No specific HOR class dominates any functional centromere (marked by centromeric histone H3) in maize.
- Observation Arabidopsis centromeres have a similar HOR landscape to maize centromeres.
- Observation Maize knobs exhibit a more structured HOR distribution than centromeres.
- Observation Large maize knobs contain megabase-scale similarity blocks with repeated HOR patterns.
- Mechanism The repeat units in knobs likely promote unequal crossing over, enabling rapid knob expansion.
- Mechanism The repeat units may harbor motifs recognized by trans-acting factors involved in meiotic drive.