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Gene silencing

Reading banned regions of genomes

The effect of DNA methylation on gene expression has been known for decades. However, the mechanism by which DNA methylation functions to repress transcription has remained a major question in the field. Wang et al. now narrow this gap through their examination of the methylation binding protein MBD2 and expose how DNA methylation is read upstream of transcriptional repression.

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Fig. 1: Context-dependent roles of the MBD2 protein.

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Correspondence to R. Keith Slotkin.

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Kramer, M.C., Swanson, R. & Slotkin, R.K. Reading banned regions of genomes. Nat. Plants 10, 7–8 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-023-01600-z

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