PCAN – Point Centromere ANnotation

PCAN is a tool used to identify and annotate point centromeres across Saccharomycetaceae (Saccharomyces, Nakaseomyces, Kluyveromyces, Torulaspora, Lachancea, …). It is designed in Python to work on genome assemblies at any level of completeness (contig, scaffold, chromosome, or complete).

Download and installation instructions can be found on Github

Please cite: Helsen J, Ramachandran K, Sherlock G, Dey G, Progressive coevolution of the yeast centromere and kinetochore. Nature 651 (8107), 1012-1019 (2026).