Biopolym. Cell. 2019; 35(3):170-171.
Chronicle and Information
Determinants of nucleosome stability
1Imre L., 1Nanasi P., 1Bosire R., 1Niaki E. F., 1Szabo G.
  1. Dept. Biophysics and Cell Biology, University of Debrecen,
    Hungary

Abstract

Nucleosome structure is, in general, repressive; hence, stability of nucleosomes is of regulatory importance in eukaryotes. Recently, we have developed a quantitative, laser scanning cytometric approach (1) to characterize nucleosome stability in situ, in a cell cycle-, posttranslational modification-, and histone variant-specific manner. This approach has allowed us to assess how the above actors, as well as superhelical density, the presence of certain reader proteins and other molecular associations regulate this central player of transcriptional regulation. Through the spectacles of nucleosome stability, a simple link can be established between the superimposed levels of chromatin organization. Our recent findings on site-specific strand-discontinuities in the genomic DNA of eukaryotes (2) also fit such a scenario. This work has been supported by grants K128770 and GINOP-2.3.2-15-2016-00044 (Hungary). (1) Imre at al., Sci Rep. 7(1):12734, 2017 (2) Hegedus et al., Nucleic Acids Res. 46(20):10649-10668, 2018