T he main hurdle for genome sequencing projects these days is no longer the effort and cost of generating sequence data—which has become exponentially cheaper—but the capacity to analyse huge amounts of data and make sense of it. This endeavour is made harder by another problem that has begun to emerge over the past years: DNA contamination. Contamination impacts both sequence data generation, ...

Cytologists have long observed that individual eukaryotic species segregate their chromosomes in one of two apparently different ways. Monocentric chromosomes attach to microtubules at a particular region (the centromere) and move toward the pole during anaphase with the centromere leading. In contrast, holocentric chromosomes bind to microtubules along their entire length and move broadside to...