Role of histone tails in chromatin folding revealed by a mesoscopic oligonucleosome model.

ABSTRACT: The role of each histone tail in regulating chromatin structure is elucidated by using a coarse-grained model of an oligonucleosome incorporating flexible histone tails that reproduces the conformational and dynamical properties of chromatin. Specifically, a tailored configurational-bias Monte Carlo method that efficiently samples the possible conformational states of oligonucleosomes yields positional distributions of histone tails around nucleosomes and illuminates the nature of tail/core/DNA interactions at various salt milieus. Analyses indicate that the H4 histone tails are most important in terms of mediating internucleosomal interactions, especially in highly compact chromatin with linker histones, followed by H3, H2A, and H2B tails in decreasing order of importance. In addition to

SUBMITTER: Arya G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1637566 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature