Table 1.

Scaling of sister kinetochore separation across phylogeny. Kinetochore separation is the distance between sister kinetochores observed in a number of organisms O. tauri (Gan, Ladinsky, and Jensen, 2011); budding yeast, S. cerevisiae (Lawrimore et al., 2016; Yeh et al., 2008); worm, C. albicans (Maddox et al., 2006); fission yeast, S. pombe (Ding, McDonald, and McIntosh, 1993); fly, D. melanogaster (Venkei et al., 2012); and human, H. sapiens (Salmon et al., 1976)]. Centromere DNA size is defined as the region of DNA required for segregation function or physically located at the primary constriction in condensed mitotic chromosomes. Centromere DNA spans 4-5 orders of magnitude in size from yeast to human, while sister kinetochore separation scales by a factor of 2, from the smallest single-cell eukaryote to multicellular organisms.

	Centromere DNA size	Kinetochore separation in mitosis
O. Tauri	~0.1 kb
S. cerevisiae	0.125 kb
C. albicans	3-4 kb	~800 nm
S. pombe	10 kb	~1,000 nm
D. melanogaster	200-500 kb	~1,000 nm
H. sapiens	500-1,500 kb