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Crystal Structure of Nucleosome Core Particle Composed of the Widom 601 DNA Sequence (orientation 1)
Structural highlights
FunctionH32_XENLA Core component of nucleosome. Nucleosomes wrap and compact DNA into chromatin, limiting DNA accessibility to the cellular machineries which require DNA as a template. Histones thereby play a central role in transcription regulation, DNA repair, DNA replication and chromosomal stability. DNA accessibility is regulated via a complex set of post-translational modifications of histones, also called histone code, and nucleosome remodeling. Evolutionary Conservation Check, as determined by ConSurfDB. You may read the explanation of the method and the full data available from ConSurf. Publication Abstract from PubMedNucleosome positioning plays a key role in genomic regulation by defining histone-DNA context and by modulating access to specific sites. Moreover, the histone-DNA register influences the double-helix structure, which in turn can affect the association between small molecules and protein factors. Analysis of genomic and synthetic DNA has revealed sequence motifs that direct nucleosome positioning in vitro; thus, establishing the basis for the DNA sequence dependence of positioning would shed light on the mechanics of the double helix and its contribution to chromatin structure in vivo. However, acquisition of well-diffracting nucleosome core particle (NCP) crystals is extremely dependent on the DNA fragment used for assembly, and all previous NCP crystal structures have been based on human alpha-satellite sequences. Here, we describe the crystal structures of Xenopus NCPs containing one of the strongest known histone octamer binding and positioning sequences, the so-called '601' DNA. Two distinct 145-bp 601 crystal forms display the same histone-DNA register, which coincides with the occurrence of DNA stretching-overtwisting in both halves of the particle around five double-helical turns from the nucleosome center, giving the DNA an 'effective length' of 147 bp. As we have found previously with stretching around two turns from the nucleosome center for a centromere-based sequence, the terminal stretching observed in 601 constructs is associated with extreme kinking into the minor groove at purine-purine (pyrimidine-pyrimidine) dinucleotide steps. In other contexts, these step types display an overall nonflexible behavior, which raises the possibility that DNA stretching in the nucleosome or extreme distortions in general have unique sequence dependency characteristics. Our findings indicate that DNA stretching is an intrinsically predisposed site-specific property of the nucleosome and suggest how NCP crystal structures with diverse DNA sequences can be obtained. Crystal Structures of Nucleosome Core Particles Containing the '601' Strong Positioning Sequence.,Vasudevan D, Chua EY, Davey CA J Mol Biol. 2010 Aug 26. PMID:20800598[1] From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. See AlsoReferences
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