Going the distance: Neocentromeres make long-range contacts with heterochromatin

Neocentromeres are ectopic centromeres that form at noncanonical, usually nonrepetitive, genomic locations. Nishimura et al. (2019. J. Cell Biol. https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201805003) explore the three-dimensional architecture of vertebrate neocentromeres, leading to a model for centromere function and maintenance via nuclear clustering with heterochromatin.