Sim3, a NASP (N1/N2) related protein, escorts CENP-A for deposition at fission yeast centromeres

A defining feature of centromeres is the presence of the histone H3 variant CENP-ACnp1. It is not known how CENP-ACnp1 is specifically delivered to, and assembled into centromeric chromatin. Through a screen for factors involved in kinetochore integrity in fission yeast we identified Sim3. Sim3 is homologous to known histone binding proteins NASPHuman and N1/N2Xenopus and aligns with Hif1S.cerevisiae to define the SHNi-TPR family. Sim3 associates with CENP-ACnp1 but is distributed throughout the nucleoplasm rather than being concentrated at centromeres. Cells defective in Sim3 function have reduced levels of CENP-ACnp1 at centromeres and display chromosome segregation defects. Newly synthesized CENPACnp1 can be deposited at centromeres by a replication-independent mechanism during G2. Sim3 is required to allow this new CENP-ACnp1 to accumulate at centromeres in S and G2-phase arrested cells. We propose that Sim3 acts as an escort which hands off CENP-ACnp1 to chromatin assembly factors, allowing its incorporation into centromeric chromatin. Keywords: Expression of sim3-143 versus wt and sim3-205 versus wt cDNA expression profiling was carried out according to (Xue et al., 2004). We used the S. pombe ORF spotted microarrays (Eurogentec, Belgium custom DNA microarray services). GeneSpring software was used for all data analysis.