AbstractWe report the sequence of a 12 kilobase region spanning the centromere ofSaccharomyces cerevisiaechromosome II. The sequence from the left arm includes genes for histones H2A and H2B. The sequence from the right arm includes a gene that probably encodes a novel trehalase, as well as theCOQ1gene (for an enzyme involved in coenzyme Q biosynthesis), and an open reading reading frame with significant similarity to bacterial genes of unknown function. The trehalase gene (YBR0106) on chromosome II is located beside the centromere and transcribed towards it. This is identical to the arrangement of the neutral trehalase gene (NTH1) beside the centromere of chromosome IV. The centromere regions of chromosomes II and IV may therefore have arisen through a duplication of the centromere region of an ancestral chromosome. The YBR0106 and NTH1 proteins are 77% identical in predicted amino acid sequence, but there is no pronounced sequence similarity between the two centromeres (CEN2andCEN4) outside of the universally conserved CDE I and CDE III elements. The genes flanking the centromere and trehalase genes differ between the two chromosomes, so the similarity between chromosomes II and IV may be less extensive than that recently reported between chromosomes III and XIV. The sequence has been deposited in the EMBL data library under Accession Number Z26494.