Letter abstract
Nature Biotechnology 25, 244 - 248 (2007)
Published online: 14 January 2007 | doi:10.1038/nbt1279
High-throughput mapping of the chromatin structure of human promoters
Fatih Ozsolak1,4, Jun S Song2,3,4, X Shirley Liu2,3 & David E Fisher1
Our understanding of how chromatin structure influences cellular processes such as transcription and replication has been limited by a lack of nucleosome-positioning data in human cells. We describe a high-resolution microarray approach combined with an analysis algorithm to examine nucleosome positioning in 3,692 promoters within seven human cell lines. Unlike unexpressed genes without transcription-preinitiation complexes at their promoters, expressed genes or genes containing preinitiation complexes exhibit characteristic nucleosome-free regions at their transcription start sites. The combination of these nucleosome data with chromatin immunoprecipitation–chip analyses reveals that the melanocyte master regulator microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) predominantly binds nucleosome-free regions, supporting the model that nucleosomes limit sequence accessibility. This study presents a global view of human nucleosome positioning and provides a high-throughput tool for analyzing chromatin structure in development and disease.
- Melanoma Program in Medical Oncology, and Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, 44 Binney Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
- Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
- Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
- These authors contributed equally to this work.
Correspondence to: David E Fisher1 e-mail: david_fisher@dfci.harvard.edu
Correspondence to: X Shirley Liu2,3 e-mail: xsliu@jimmy.harvard.edu
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