{"doi":"10.1093/nar/gkaf906","title":"Runaway evolution of telomeres in ascomycetous yeasts was accompanied by the replacement of ancestral telomeric proteins","abstract":"Telomeres are crucial parts of eukaryotic chromosomes, contributing to DNA replication, chromosome segregation, and genome stability. While in most phylogenetic lineages, telomere-maintenance systems are conserved, ascomycetous yeasts exhibit a high degree of variability in telomeric repeats and the associated proteins. The determinants that enabled this divergent evolutionary process, however, have been unclear. Here, we show that DNA-binding properties of yeast telomere-binding proteins (TBPs) support the scenario where the gradual divergence of telomeric repeats led to their replacement. We analyzed the DNA-protein interactions between Tay1p from Yarrowia lipolytica, Rap1p from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Taz1p from Schizosaccharomyces pombe and a set of telomeric repeats from several yeast species and delineated how the ancestral (Tay1p-like) TBPs were replaced by Rap1p (in budding yeasts) or Taz1p (in fission yeasts). We also postulate two different driving forces for these replacements: (i) Tay1p-to-Rap1p transition appears to be driven by differences in sequence preferences of Tay1p and Rap1p, while (ii) Taz1p became the principal TBP in fission yeast presumably due to its DNA-binding flexibility. Together, our results suggest that in telomeric DNA-protein complexes, the replacement of protein component triggered by the initial variation in DNA sequence space opens the door to further divergence in a runaway-style evolution.","journal":"Nucleic Acids Research","year":2025,"id":575356,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9326,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1439208,"name":"Sofia Virágová","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1483658,"name":"Martina Sopkovičová","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1483659,"name":"Dominik Kodada","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1483660,"name":"Erik Galla","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":591960,"name":"Regina Sepšiová","orcid":"0000-0002-8709-7882","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":473796,"name":"Ľubomír Tomáška","orcid":"0000-0003-4886-1910","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1438804,"name":"Filip Červenák","orcid":"0000-0001-6886-8883","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":87,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:57:48.486077Z","pmid":"40973456","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}