Nucleosomes articles from across Nature Portfolio

Spangler et al. used a substrate inhibitor covalent conjugate strategy to solve cryo-EM structures of nucleosomes in complex with the lysine demethylase KDM2, which demonstrates that KDM2A, but not its closely related paralog, KDM2B, anchors to the acidic patch to direct histone H3K36-specific demethylation.

Basu and colleagues comprehensively characterize how sequence and epigenetic modifications impact the local mechanical properties of DNA. The results suggest that DNA mechanics may have evolved to aid diverse DNA-deforming biological processes.

Here the authors show that a Polycomb Repressive Complex 1 (PRC1) containing PCGF1 prevents excessive loading of transcriptional activators and chromatin remodelers on nascent DNA, allowing proper deposition of nucleosomes immediately after the passage of the DNA replication fork to optimize downstream chromatin configurations in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs).

Most eukaryotes do not use a consensus DNA sequence as binding sites for the origin recognition complex (ORC) to initiate DNA replication, however budding yeast do. Here the authors show S. cerevisiae ORC can bind nucleosomes near nucleosome-free regions and recruit replicative helicases to form a pre-replication complex independent of the DNA sequence.

Using combined methods of modern chemical protein synthesis and structural biology, Ai et al. found a crosstalk mechanism of histone modifications, by which H2BK34ub stimulates the activity of the H3K79 methyltransferase Dot1L through inducing nucleosome distortion.

Here the authors provide a multi-omic study of the nucleosome landscape in LNCaP cells and observe nine functional nucleosome states each with characteristic nucleosome footprints. Upon androgen stimulation, they observed changes in these nucleosome states accompanied by changes in binding and function of pioneer factors, including GATA2.