MCB Associate Professor Barbara Mellone received a $2.6million R35-MIRA grant from the National Institute of Health to fund her research on an elusive yet vital chromosomal structure that all plant and animal share: the centromere. This five-year grant will support research efforts to determine the contribution of DNA repeats and centromere chromatin to the formation and proper function of these structures and to engineer centromeres using Drosophila as a model.