Abstract
What can go wrong after an egg is fertilized by sperm from a different species? One of the most intriguing outcomes to the chromosome biologist is uniparental genome elimination. In this phenomenon, one of the parental chromosome sets is completely lost during embryonic cell divisions, creating sterile haploid offspring (1). Uniparental genome elimination occurs in diverse taxa, including several distantly related plant species and even in fish (1, 2). The mechanism by which chromosomes from one parent are selectively discarded has been studied cytologically in crosses between different grass species. However, these experiments have not revealed what is defective about the eliminated genome in a hybrid. In PNAS, Sanei et al. (3) make a major breakthrough by showing that missegregated chromosomes in a classic barley interspecies cross (Hordeum vulgare × Hordeum bulbosum) fail to assemble kinetochores, the microtubule attachment sites that mediate chromosome inheritance.
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