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Publication Abstract from PubMed

It has long been suggested that chromatin may form a fiber with a diameter of ~30 nm that suppresses transcription. Despite nearly four decades of study, the structural nature of the 30-nm chromatin fiber and conclusive evidence of its existence in vivo remain elusive. The key support for the existence of specific 30-nm chromatin fiber structures is based on the determination of the structures of reconstituted nucleosome arrays using X-ray crystallography and single-particle cryo-electron microscopy coupled with glutaraldehyde chemical cross-linking. Here we report the characterization of these nucleosome arrays in solution using analytical ultracentrifugation, NMR, and small-angle X-ray scattering. We found that the physical properties of these nucleosome arrays in solution are not consistent with formation of just a few discrete structures of nucleosome arrays. In addition, we obtained a crystal of the nucleosome in complex with the globular domain of linker histone H5 that shows a new form of nucleosome packing and suggests a plausible alternative compact conformation for nucleosome arrays. Taken together, our results challenge the key evidence for the existence of a limited number of structures of reconstituted nucleosome arrays in solution by revealing that the reconstituted nucleosome arrays are actually best described as an ensemble of various conformations with a zigzagged arrangement of nucleosomes. Our finding has implications for understanding the structure and function of chromatin in vivo.

Revisit of Reconstituted 30-nm Nucleosome Arrays Reveals an Ensemble of Dynamic Structures.,Zhou BR, Jiang J, Ghirlando R, Norouzi D, Sathish Yadav KN, Feng H, Wang R, Zhang P, Zhurkin V, Bai Y J Mol Biol. 2018 Sep 14;430(18 Pt B):3093-3110. doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2018.06.020., Epub 2018 Jun 27. PMID:29959925^[1]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.