Background: Infertility is a complex medical problem. About 15% of couples are infertile, and male infertility being involved in roughly 50% of the cases. Among these, many cases are associated with a severe impairment of spermatogenesis. During the last stage of spermatogenesis (spermiogenesis), sperm chromatin endures complex modifications in which histones are lost and depositioned with tran...

Condensin is the core activity responsible for chromosome condensation in mitosis. In the yeast S. cerevisiae, condensin binding is enriched at the regions where DNA replication terminates. Therefore, we investigated whether DNA replication completion determines the condensin-binding proficiency of chromatin. In order to fulfill putative mitotic requirements for condensin activity we analyzed c...

in this study calf thymus chromatin was fractionated into active (s1 and s2) and inactive (p 2) chromatin. then the interaction of an anthracyc1ine antibiotic, adriamycin, with these fractions was investigated employing absorption and difference uv nis spectroscopy and sds and agarose gel electrophoreses. the results suggest that the binding of adriamycin to the s 1 fraction is slight but s2 an...

Mechanical cues direct the lineage commitment of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). In this study, we identified the operative molecular mechanisms through which dynamic tensile loading (DL) regulates changes in chromatin organization and nuclear mechanics in MSCs. Our data show that, in the absence of exogenous differentiation factors, short term DL elicits a rapid increase in chromatin condensati...

Association of the condensin multiprotein complex with chromatin is required for chromosome condensation at mitosis. What regulates condensin targeting to chromatin is largely unknown. We previously showed that the nuclear A kinase-anchoring protein, AKAP95, is implicated in chromosome condensation. We demonstrate here that AKAP95 acts as a targeting protein for human chromosome-associated prot...

Linker histones are involved in chromatin higher-order structure and gene regulation. We have successfully achieved partial phosphorylation of linker histones in chicken erythrocyte soluble chromatin with CDK2, as indicated by HPCE, MALDI-TOF and Tandem MS. We have studied the effects of linker histone partial phosphorylation on secondary structure and chromatin condensation. Infrared spectrosc...

The effects of hyperthermia on chromatin condensation and nucleoli disintegration, as visualized by induction of premature chromosome condensation in interphase mammalian cells, was studied in exponentially growing and plateau phase Chinese hamster ovary cells. Exposure to heat reduced the ability of interphase chromatin to condense and the ability of the nucleolar organizing region to disinteg...