"It's the ultimate black box of our genome," says Huntington F. Willard, "and it doesn't play according to the rules." • Willard, who heads the Institute for Genomic Sciences and Policy at Duke University and is a member of HHMI's Scientific Review Board, spends much of his time thinking about this peculiar piece of DNA, called a centromere. Sitting at the waistline of our chromosome, centromeres have a vital job—to direct the shuffling of chromosomes during cell division. And although they are generally reliable, they do make genetic mistakes—"perhaps one in a hundred cell divisions," says Willard. continued...

Photo: Courtesy of the Willard Lab

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
December 2003, pages 12-17.
©2003 Howard Hughes Medical Institute