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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2019 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: Chromosome Res. 2018 Jul 5;26(3):115–138. doi: 10.1007/s10577-018-9582-3

Figure 5. Alpha satellite sequence requirements for HAC formation.

Figure 5.

HACs are commonly generated by transfection of BACs containing alpha satellite sequence into human cell lines. BACs containing alpha satellite HORs (blue arrays) with CENP-B boxes (white monomer arrows) are the only material sufficient to form a HAC. The resulting HAC contains multimerized BAC sequence. A centromere forms on a portion of the HAC and, like endogenous chromosomes, contains both CENP-A (purple) and H3K4me2/H3K36me2 (red) nucleosomes and is flanked by pericentromeric heterochromatin (green). The centromere can form on both alpha satellite sequence and vector sequence. In contrast, BACs containing alpha satellite HORs that lack CENP-B boxes or monomeric alpha satellite are not sufficient to form stable HACs and are often observed to integrate into chromosome arms,