A streamlined cohesin apparatus is sufficient for mitosis and meiosis in the protist Tetrahymena.

In order to understand its diverse functions, we have studied cohesin in the evolutionarily distant ciliate model organism Tetrahymena thermophila. In this binucleate cell, the heritable germline genome is maintained separately from the transcriptionally active somatic genome. In a previous study, we showed that a minimal cohesin complex in Tetrahymena consisted of homologs of Smc1, Smc3, and Rec8, which are present only in the germline nucleus, where they are needed for normal chromosome segregation as well as meiotic DNA repair.