The paper
M. Jagannathan et al., “A conserved function for pericentromeric satellite DNA,” eLife, 7:e34122, 2018.
Between cell divisions, pericentromeric DNA—noncoding, repetitive satellite DNA abundant around centromeres—bunches together across several chromosomes to cluster them into structures called chromocenters.
The function of pericentromeric DNA and of chromocenters had remained largely unknown until cell biologist Yukiko Yamashita and her team at the University of Michigan set out to see what would happen to fruit fly cells without them. Simply mutating or excising pericentromeric DNA, which occurs as long sequences of tandem repeats, would have been impractical. So Yamashita’s group instead targeted a protein, D1, that’s known to interact with satellite DNA. When D1 was mutated, fruit fly germ cells did not survive for long. The researchers stained these mutant, dying germ cells with an antibody for Vasa, a cytoplasmic protein, and saw dark spots that turned out to be micronuclei, aberrant structures ...
