Chromatin structure articles from across Nature Portfolio

Plants utilize transcriptional dynamics to adapt to cold stress. Here, Zhang et al. describe a network of chromatin interactions between gene promoters across the Arabidopsis genome that could facilitate co-regulation of gene expression during cold stress.

CTCF, which is known to play critical role in chromatin structure, undergoes post-translational modifications (PTMs). In this research, O-GlcNAcylation was found to inhibit CTCF binding, impacting 3D chromatin structure, gene expression and cellular development.

Here the authors uncover p53’s role as the master regulator of spatio-temporal genome organization. p53 controls the expression of 340 distal genes through newly formed and pre-existing loops between p53-bound enhancers and promoters.

In this Review, the authors present an overview of our current understanding of the relationship between DNA methylation and three-dimensional chromatin architecture, discussing the extent to which DNA methylation may regulate the folding of the genome.

Kdm1a is a histone demethylase implicated in intellectual disability. Here, the authors show that removing Kdm1a in neurons of the adult mouse forebrain disrupts silencing of nonneuronal genes and chromatin organization, emphasizing its role in preserving neuronal genome integrity.

CRISPR arrays form the physical memory of prokaryotic adaptive immune systems by incorporating viral DNA sequences as spacers. Here, Blombach et al. show that transcription factor Cbp1 recruits chromatin protein Cren7 at CRISPR arrays, forming ‘chimeric’ chromatin-like structures that regulate expression of long CRISPR arrays in Sulfolobales archaea.

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.

Pollex et al. investigate the mechanisms by which chromatin loops bring together paralogues to coordinate gene expression in Drosophila.

Advances in profiling chromosome structure help reveal the regulatory roles of gene organization.

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.

A study in Molecular Cell reveals how CTCF and cohesin contribute to genome organization through their roles in forming and stacking chromatin loops.