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Chromatin structure describes the physical structure of chromatin within the eukaryotic nucleus and how structure affects chromatin processes such as transcription. The repeating unit of chromatin, the nucleosome, consists of approximately 147 base pairs of DNA wrapped around eight histone protein cores. Linker DNA, upwards of 80 base pairs long, connects two histones between each nucleosome core unit.
R-loops and G-quadruplexes are non-canonical nucleic acid structures with known roles in genome organization. Here, Wulfridge and Sarma highlight emerging roles in DNA repair and transcriptional and epigenetic gene regulation.
Ma, Cao et al. uncover dynamic changes of chromatin reorganization in progenitor B cells during ageing, associated with altered H3K27ac levels and expression of genes that are critical for B cell development.
The three-dimensional architecture of the host genome condenses, reorganizes, and alters its accessibility resulting in bidirectional gene expression changes in response to viral infection over time.
Here the authors elucidate how epigenetic regulation influences the regulatory impact of transposable elements in the human genome using cellular models of the neurodegenerative disease XDP, which is caused by an SVA insertion at the TAF1 locus.
Here, the authors generate a mouse line by knocking in the auxin-inducible degron tag to the SMARCA4 gene, which encodes BRG1. They suggest that BRG1 primarily contributes positively to chromatin accessibility, RNAP binding, and nascent RNA production.
A study in Nature Genetics identifies many regulators of genome-wide chromatin accessibility and then reports the mechanistic underpinnings for one of the identified transcription factors.
Genome architecture mapping (GAM) enables understanding of 3D genome structure in the nucleus. We directly compared multiplex-GAM and Hi-C data and found that local chromatin interactions were generally detected by both methods, but active genomic regions rich in enhancers that established higher-order contacts were preferentially detected by GAM.