Skip to main content

Proper DNA organization is required for cell’s normal functioning

Chromatin, the structure composed of DNA and proteins that makes up chromosomes. Its main role is to package DNA molecules containing all the organism's genes into the cell nucleus, which is approximately 20,000 times smaller than the DNA itself.
Chromatin is carefully organized in such a way that genes remain "accessible" to the various proteins required for gene expression, or the interpretation of the genic information stored in DNA.
Chromatin therefore provides the organism with another layer of information, referred to as epigenetic information, which is made available, in part, through specialized histones called histone variants.
This extreme compaction is made possible by proteins called histones, which condense the DNA much like thread is wound around a spool. Authors studied one histone variant called H2A.Z. H2A.Z is located in specific regions of the gene called promoters, which are involved in controlling gene expression. It is known that H2A.Z is necessary for promoters to function properly.

"With this study, we discovered that two other proteins (FACT and Spt6) play an important role in the location of H2A.Z," adds Dr. Jeronimo. "In fact, we found that these proteins are essential to prevent an accumulation of H2A.Z in inappropriate regions of the gene, which leads to a disorganized chromatin structure."
The study also reveals that inhibiting the inappropriate positioning of H2A.Z is crucial to prevent gene expression defects called "cryptic transcription".
Inappropriate H2A.Z localization has previously been observed in cancer cells, but little was understood about the consequences of this phenomenon and this study suggests that mislocalization of H2A.Z may lead to cryptic transcription in some types of cancer such as lymphoma, and this may contribute to the disease. VIA Science Mission 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hootsuite - A modern Social Media Management Tool

Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi. Additional integrations are available via Hootsuite’s App Directory, including Instagram, MailChimp, Reddit, Storify, Tumblr, Vimeo and YouTube. Based in Vancouver, Hootsuite has over 500 staff located in Vancouver, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, London, Sydney, Singapore, and other countries. The company operates on a freemium model and has over 10 million users in more than 175 countries. The service is commonly used to manage online brands and to submit messages to a variety of social media services, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Mixi. Companies and organizations known to use Hootsuite include Facebook, PrintBindaas, the Obama administration, HBO, Martha Stewart Media, ...

A new ‘Pain Sensing’ gene discovered!

Researchers analysed the genetic make-up of 11 families across Europe and Asia affected by an inherited condition known as congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). This enabled them to pinpoint the cause of the condition to variants of the gene PRDM12. Family members affected by CIP carried two copies of the variant; however, if they had only inherited one copy from their parents, they were unaffected. PRDM12 had previously been implicated  in the modification of chromatin, a small molecule that attaches to our DNA and acts like a switch to turn genes on and off (an effect known as epigenetics). The researchers showed that all the genetic variants of PRDM12 in the CIP patients blocked the gene's function. The team looked at nerve biopsies taken from the patients to see what had gone wrong and found that particular pain-sensing neurons were absent. From these clinical features of the disease, the team predicted that there would be a block to the production of pain-sensing neur...

Fifteen programming languages you need to know in 2015

1. Java 2. JavaScript 3.C# 4. PHP 5. C++ 6. Python 7. C 8. SQL 9.Ruby 10. Objective-C 11. Perl 12 .NET 13. Visual Basic 14. R 15. Swift BONUS: Teaching Kids to Code with a Board Game