Probing Chromatin-modifying Enzymes with Chemical Tools

New Nomenclature for Chromatin-Modifying Enzymes

In the last ten years, the importance of chromatin modifications in many aspects of biology has become apparent. Several families of enzymes that modify histones have been identified, the majority of which are conserved throughout evolution. The enormous interest in this field has resulted in a very rapid rate of discovery of new enzymes, but this in turn has lead to a noncoherent nomenclature ...

Chromatin-modifying enzymes in transcription and cancer

In recent years, our view of how gene expression is controlled has changed dramatically. The discovery of enzymes that modify histones has revealed that transcription is an enzymically driven process. Such modifications can recruit specific proteins and mediate chromatin changes that affect transcription either positively or negatively. Important biological pathways leading to cell proliferatio...

Probing the impact of chromatin conformation on genome editing tools

Transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and RNA-guided nucleases derived from clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 systems have become ubiquitous genome editing tools. Despite this, the impact that distinct high-order chromatin conformations have on these sequence-specific designer nucleases is, presently, ill-defined. The same applies to th...

Chemical tools for probing histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity.

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) enzymes are responsible for removing epigenetic markers on histone proteins, which results in chromatin inactivation and gene repression. An evaluation of HDAC activity is essential for not only determining the physiological function of HDACs, but also for developing HDAC-targeting drugs. This review focuses on the chemical tools used to detect HDAC activity. We hig...

SnapShot: Histone-Modifying Enzymes