Sub-nucleosomal Genome Structure Reveals Distinct Nucleosome Folding Motifs.

By M. Ohno, T. Ando, D. Priest, Vipin Kumar, Y. Yoshida, Y. Taniguchi. 2019

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Elucidating the global and local rules that govern genome-wide, hierarchical chromatin architecture remains a critical challenge. Current high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) technologies have identified large-scale chromatin structural motifs, such as topologically associating domains and looping. However, structural rules at the smallest or nucleosome scale remain poorly understood. Here, we coupled nucleosome-resolved Hi-C technology with simulated annealing-molecular dynamics (SA-MD) simulation to reveal 3D spatial distributions of nucleosomes and their genome-wide orientation in chromatin. Our method, called Hi-CO, revealed distinct nucleosome folding motifs across the yeast genome. Our results uncovered two types of basic secondary structural motifs in nucleosome folding: α-tetrahedron and β-rhombus analogous to α helix and β sheet motifs in protein folding. Using mutants and cell-cycle-synchronized cells, we further uncovered motifs with specific nucleosome positioning and orientation coupled to epigenetic features at individual loci. By illuminating molecular-level structure-function relationships in eukaryotic chromatin, our findings establish organizational principles of nucleosome folding.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Plant Science

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In Molecular Biology

1. Victor B. Zhurkin
2. D. Norouzi

Citations in the corpus

• Topological polymorphism of nucleosome fibers and folding of chromatin (2021, background): “Third, Micro-C (14–16) and Hi-CO (17) experiments revealed various structural motifs characterized by distinct nucleosome folding in vivo, from yeast to humans.”