The well-known regenerative abilities of planarian flatworms are attributed to a population of adult stem cells called neoblasts that proliferate and differentiate to produce all cell types. A characteristic feature of neoblasts is the presence of large cytoplasmic ribonucleoprotein granules named chromatoid bodies, the function of which has remained largely elusive. This study shows that histo...

Histone chaperones are thought to be important for maintaining the physiological activity of histones; however, their exact roles are not fully understood. The physiological function of template activating factor (TAF)-I, one of the histone chaperones, also remains unclear; however, its biochemical properties have been well studied. By performing microarray analyses, we found that TAF-I stimula...

RbAp48 (RbAp46 and RbAp48 are closely related proteins). Perhaps significantly, RbAp48 is associated with Department of Biology and Center for Molecular Genetics HDAC1 (Taunton et al., 1996) and is also a subunit of chromatin assembly factor 1 (for reviews, see Roth and A brief guide to the factors that were studied in each of the papers is given in Table 1. Chromatin structure is an important ...

The NuRD complex is a multi-protein transcriptional corepressor that couples histone deacetylase and ATP-dependent chromatin remodelling activities. The complex regulates the higher-order structure of chromatin, and has important roles in the regulation of gene expression, DNA damage repair and cell differentiation. HDACs 1 and 2 are recruited by the MTA1 corepressor to form the catalytic core ...

The histones of all eukaryotes show only a low degree of primary structure homology, but our earlier crystallographic results defined a three-dimensional structural motif, the histone fold, common to all core histones. We now examine the specific architectural patterns within the fold and analyze the nature of the amino acid residues within its functional segments. The histone fold emerges as a...

Nucleosome Remodeling Factor (NURF) is an ATP-dependent nucleosome remodeling complex that alters chromatin structure by catalyzing nucleosome sliding, thereby exposing DNA sequences previously associated with nucleosomes. We systematically studied how the unstructured N-terminal residues of core histones (the N-terminal histone tails) influence nucleosome sliding. We used bacterially expressed...

The replication-dependent histone genes encode mRNAs that are expressed during S phase. When DNA synthesis ceases, histone mRNAs are rapidly degraded via the activation of a specific mRNA destabilization process. It has been proposed that this process is autoregulated by histone proteins and is triggered by an increase in the abundance of cytoplasmic histones that accompanies the cessation of D...

The well-known regenerative abilities of planarian flatworms are attributed to a population of adult stem cells called neoblasts that proliferate and differentiate to produce all cell types. A characteristic feature of neoblasts is the presence of large cytoplasmic ribonucleoprotein granules named chromatoid bodies, the function of which has remained largely elusive. This study shows that histo...

The nucleosome core particle (NCP) is the basic structural unit for genome packaging in eukaryotic cells and consists of DNA wound around a core of eight histone proteins. DNA access is modulated through dynamic processes of NCP disassembly. Partly disassembled structures, such as the hexasome (containing six histones) and the tetrasome (four histones), are important for transcription regulatio...