Posttranslational modifications of histones regulate chromatin structure and gene expression. Histone demethylases, members of a newly emerging transcription-factor family, remove methyl groups from the lysine residues of the histone tails and thereby regulate the transcriptional activity of target genes. JmjC-domain-containing proteins have been predicted to be demethylases. For example, the J...

Free DNA in solution exhibits an untwisting of the double helix with increasing temperature. We have shown previously that when DNA is reconstituted with histones to form nucleosome core particles, both the core DNA and the adjacent linker DNA are constrained from thermal untwisting. The origin of this constraint is unknown. Here we examine the effect of two modifications of nucleosome structur...

The Histone fold motif (HFM) is one of the most conserved structural motifs in biology, mainly found in the core histone sub-units of all eukaryotes. The HFM represents a helix-strand-helix motif having three alpha helices connected by two loops/beta strands. This helix-strand-helix motif has the unique property of binding strongly with proteins as well as with DNA. Apart from core histones, th...

The human p300/CBP-associating factor, PCAF, mediates transcriptional activation through its ability to acetylate nucleosomal histone substrates as well as transcriptional activators such as p53. We have determined the 2.3 A crystal structure of the histone acetyltransferase (HAT) domain of PCAF bound to coenzyme A. The structure reveals a central protein core associated with coenzyme A binding...

Centromeres are sites of spindle attachment for chromosome segregation. During meiosis, recombination is absent at centromeres and surrounding regions. To understand the molecular basis for recombination suppression, we have comprehensively annotated the 3.5-Mb region that spans a fully sequenced rice centromere. Although transcriptional analysis showed that the 750-kb CENH3-containing core is ...

Various types of post-translational modifications of the histone tails have been revealed, but a few modifications have been found within the histone core sequences. Histone core post-translational modifications have the potential to modulate nucleosome structure and DNA accessibility. Here, we studied the histone H2B core domain and found that phosphorylation of H2B serine 32 occurs in normal ...

A specialized nucleosome is a component of all eukaryotic kinetochores. The core of this nucleosome contains a centromere-specific histone, CENP-A (the Cse4 gene product in budding yeast), instead of the usual H3. Assembly of a centromeric nucleosome depends on a specific chaperone, called Scm3 in yeast and HJURP in higher eukaryotes. We describe here the structure of a complex formed by an N-t...

We have recently reported that certain core histone-DNA contacts are altered in nucleosomes during chromatin unfolding (Usachenko, S. I., Gavin I. M., and Bavykin, S. G. (1996) J. Biol. Chem. 271, 3831-3836). In this work, we demonstrate that these alterations are caused by a conformational change in the nucleosomal DNA. Using zero-length protein-DNA cross-linking, we have mapped histone-DNA co...

DNA replication involves the chromatin assembly on new DNA strands which involves the formation of new nucleosomes, the basic unit of chromatin. Nucleosome is composed of the tetramer of H3/H4 histones and two dimers of histones H2A/ H2B that are wrapped around with DNA segment [1,2]. H3/ H4 and H2A/H2B histones are called core histones as they are positioned in the center of nucleosome. Some c...

We have analyzed the structure of the trypsin-resistant core of the protein PL-II* of the sperm from Mytilus californianus. The peptide has a molecular mass of 8436 Da and its primary sequence is ATGGAKKP STLSMIVAAIQAMKNRKGSSVQAIRKYILANNKG INTSRLGSAMKLAFAKGLKSGVLVRPKTSAGA SGATGSFRVG. This sequence bears an enormous homology and fulfills the constraints of the consensus sequence of the trypsin-r...