Molecular VELCRO for chromosome stability

A team of scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Geneva has functionally dissected the molecular processes that ensure the stability of chromosomes. They show in the renowned scientific journal Cell, how three proteins interact on the repetitive sequences at the chromosomal ends, the telomeres, to form a powerful protein scaffold required for telomere homeostasis. The genome is full of sequence repetitions. Sequence motif is added after sequence motif, sometimes more than a hundred times. Erratically it seems. And these sequence motifs bind proteins that control transcription factors in regions of the genome where no transcription should occur. A conundrum.