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Published October 2013 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Chromatin in a marine picoeukaryote is a disordered assemblage of nucleosomes

Abstract

Chromatin organization is central to many conserved biological processes, but it is generally unknown how the underlying nucleosomes are arranged in situ. Here, we have used electron cryotomography to study chromatin in the picoplankton Ostreococcus tauri, the smallest known free-living eukaryote. By visualizing the nucleosome densities directly, we find that O. tauri chromosomes do not arrange into discrete, compact bodies or any other higher level of order. In contrast to the textbook 30-nm fiber model, O. tauri chromatin resembles a disordered assemblage of nucleosomes akin to the polymer melt model. This disorganized nucleosome arrangement has important implications for potentially conserved functions in tiny eukaryotes such as the clustering of nonhomologous chromosomes at the kinetochore during mitosis and the independent regulation of closely positioned adjacent genes.

Additional Information

© 2013 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. Received: 4 February 2013; Revised: 26 May 2013; Accepted: 12 June 2013; Published online: 3 July 2013. We thank Drs. J. Huiskonen for advice on Jsubtomo, M. Swulius for discussions on template matching, H. Wong and J. Mozziconacci for sharing their 30-nm fiber model, and Drs. A. McDowall and D. Rhodes for discussions on chromatin. This work was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gordon and Betty Moore Center for Integrative Study of Cell Regulation. MSL was supported by NIH grant 2 R37 AI041239-06A1 to P. Björkman. LG was supported by a fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation (DRG-1940-07) and startup funds from NUS.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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