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Rapid evolution to preserve a conserved function

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 26, page 416 (2025)Cite this article

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Malik and Henikoff noted that the fast evolution of this centromeric histone variant mirrors the rapid evolution of centromeric DNA. In multicellular eukaryotes, centromeric DNA comprises either DNA satellite repeats or arrays of transposable elements. Like many repeat-rich genomic regions, centromeric DNA evolves rapidly. For centromere researchers, this observation indicated that the centromere must be exclusively epigenetically defined; that is, centromere identity is determined only by the centromeric histone variant, not by centromeric DNA. But this dominant paradigm was incompatible with the observation by Malik and Henikoff that Cid also evolves rapidly. Indeed, Cid appeared to be evolving like an ‘adaptor’ protein that mediates between the rapid centromere sequence evolution and the conserved attachment of microtubules to chromosomes. If the rapid evolution of the centromere sequence was inconsequential, then Cid should be as strictly conserved as the microtubule attachments to chromosomes. Instead, it appeared that Cid evolution is required to block or to mitigate the deleterious consequences of centromere evolution in an ongoing molecular arms race.

“The discovery that this strictly conserved function is supported by a wildly unconserved protein was, at the time, an evolutionary enigma”

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  1. Department of Biology, Epigenetics Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Mia T. Levine

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  1. Mia T. Levine
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Correspondence to Mia T. Levine.

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Levine, M.T. Rapid evolution to preserve a conserved function. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 26, 416 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-025-00848-x

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