Towards to understanding the regulation of epigenetic codes in development
Hui-Min Wei, Jian-Quan Ni*, Jian-Feng Chang, Lu-Ping Liu*, Dao-Ying Zhang and Hong Luo and Bing Zhu** and Fang-Lin Sun,
Institute of Epigenetics and Cancer Research, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P.R. China （e-mail:sfl@tsinghua.edu.cn）
*Friedich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, CH 4058, Switzeralnd; current address: Department of Genetics, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02175, USA.
**National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, China
Epigenetic modifications are involved in the regulation of variety of nuclear processes essential for cellular regulation, homeostasis and cell fate determination. We are mainly interested in the function and mechanism of chromatin modulators in control of chromatin and transcription during development.
Linker histone H1 is believed to bind to the chromatosomal DNA, protecting an additional 20 bp of DNA, and has a fundamental role in promoting or facilitating the condensation of nucleosome filaments into supercoiled chromatin fibers. We use Drosophila melanogaster as a model system to investigate the role of H1 in vivo.
Unlike other higher eukaryotes, the D. melanogaster genome contains about 100 copies of histone H1 genes; however, these only encode a single type of H1 protein with the typical linker H1 structure found in other higher eukaryotes. In this work, we provide evidence that Drosophila linker H1 plays an important role in regulating core histone modifications in vivo. The distribution of H1 on chromatin is compared with core histone modifcations on polytene chromosome. Using transgenic flies, we demonstrate that linker H1 affects neuron stem cell differentiation and normal development. We further map the functional domains of H1 in the regulation of chromatin and development. Last, we find that linker H1 interacts with specific core histone. A model of linker H1 in modulating chromatin structure will be discussed.
编辑: ludongcn 作者:Fang-Lin Sun
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