Mitotic tethering enables inheritance of shattered micronuclear chromosomes

Chromothripsis, the shattering and imperfect reassembly of one (or a few) chromosome(s)¹, is an ubiquitous² mutational process generating localized and complex chromosomal rearrangements that drive genome evolution in cancer. Chromothripsis can be initiated by mis-segregation errors in mitosis^3,4 or DNA metabolism^5-7 that lead to entrapment of chromosomes within micronuclei and their subsequent fragmentation in the next interphase or following mitotic entry^6,8-10. Here we use inducible degrons to demonstrate that chromothriptically produced pieces of a micronucleated chromosome are tethered together in mitosis by a protein complex consisting of mediator of DNA damage checkpoint 1 (MDC1), DNA topoisomerase II-binding protein 1 (TOPBP1) and cellular inhibitor of PP2A (CIP2A), thereby enabling en masse segregation to the same daughter cell. Such tethering is shown to be crucial for the viability of cells undergoing chromosome mis-segregation and shattering after transient inactivation of the spindle assembly checkpoint. Transient, degron-induced reduction in CIP2A following chromosome micronucleation-dependent chromosome shattering is shown to drive acquisition of segmental deletions and inversions. Analyses of pancancer tumour genomes showed that expression of CIP2A and TOPBP1 was increased overall in cancers with genomic rearrangements, including copy number-neutral chromothripsis with minimal deletions, but comparatively reduced in cancers with canonical chromothripsis in which deletions were frequent. Thus, chromatin-bound tethers maintain the proximity of fragments of a shattered chromosome enabling their re-encapsulation into, and religation within, a daughter cell nucleus to form heritable, chromothriptically rearranged chromosomes found in the majority of human cancers.