Minimal Cylinder Analysis Reveals the Mechanical Properties of Oncogenic Nucleosomes.

ABSTRACT: Histone variants regulate replication, transcription, DNA damage repair, and chromosome segregation. Though widely accepted as a paradigm, it has not been rigorously demonstrated that histone variants encode unique mechanical properties. Here, we present a new theoretical approach called minimal cylinder analysis that uses strain fluctuations to determine the Young's modulus of nucleosomes from all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. Recently, we validated this computational tool against in vitro single-molecule nanoindentation of histone variant nucleosomes. In this report, we further extend minimal cylinder analysis to study the biophysical properties of hybrid nucleosomes that are known to exist in human cancer cells and contain H3 histone variants CENP-A and H3.3. Here, we report that

SUBMITTER: Pitman M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7203005 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature