Identification of lamin B–regulated chromatin regions based on chromatin landscapes

Lamins, the major structural components of the nuclear lamina (NL) found beneath the nuclear envelope, are known to interact with most of the nuclear peripheral chromatin in metazoan cells. Although NL-chromatin associations correlate with a repressive chromatin state, the role of lamins in tethering chromatin to NL and how such tether influences gene expression have remained challenging to decipher. Studies suggest that NL proteins regulate chromatin in a context-dependent manner. Therefore understanding the context of chromatin states based on genomic features, including chromatin-NL interactions, is important to the study of lamins and other NL proteins. By modeling genome organization based on combinatorial patterns of chromatin association with lamin B1, core histone modification, and core and linker histone occupancy, we report six distinct large chromatin landscapes, referred to as histone lamin landscapes (HiLands)-red (R), -orange (O), -yellow (Y), -green (G), -blue (B), and -purple (P), in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs). This HiLands model demarcates the previously mapped lamin-associated chromatin domains (LADs) into two HiLands, HiLands-B and HiLands-P, which are similar to facultative and constitutive heterochromatins, respectively. Deletion of B-type lamins in mESCs caused a reduced interaction between regions of HiLands-B and NL as measured by emerin-chromatin interaction. Our findings reveal the importance of analyzing specific chromatin types when studying the function of NL proteins in chromatin tether and regulation.