Journal
CURRENT OPINION IN GENETICS & DEVELOPMENT
Volume 37, Issue -, Pages 119-128Publisher
CURRENT BIOLOGY LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.gde.2016.03.002
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Funding
- Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from NIH/NCI [F32CA157188]
- EMBO Long-term Fellowship [ALTF 186-2014]
- NIH Director's Pioneer Award from NIH/NIGMS [RO1GM085169, 5DP1GM106412]
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The presence of maternal and paternal homologs appears to be much more than just a doubling of genetic material. We know this because genomes have evolved elaborate mechanisms that permit homologous regions to sense and then respond to each other. One way in which homologs communicate is to come into contact and, in fact, Dipteran insects such as Drosophila excel at this task, aligning all pairs of maternal and paternal chromosomes, end-to-end, in essentially all somatic tissues throughout development. Here, we reexamine the widely held tenet that extensive somatic pairing of homologous sequences cannot occur in mammals and suggest, instead, that pairing may be a widespread and significant potential that has gone unnoticed in mammals because they expend considerable effort to prevent it. We then extend this discussion to interchromosomal interactions, in general, and speculate about the potential of nuclear organization and pairing to impact inheritance.
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