Centromere location in Arabidopsis is unaltered by extreme divergence in CENH3 protein sequence

CENH3 from other species can can complement the cenh3-1 mutant of A. thaliana. The complemented plants look normal until crossed to the wild type, when they become haploid inducers. Maheshwari et al. show that a diverged CENH3 recognizes the same sequences as the endogenous one. This is surprising and inconsistent with expectations that CENH3 would coevolve with DNA targets. In addition, the authors describe the main active CEN repeat of A. thaliana