Every cell type in the human body carries the same approximately 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA, yet a liver cell behaves nothing like a neuron. The epigenome explains this difference: in each cell, ...

Histone modifications constitute a dynamic layer of epigenetic regulation that shapes gene expression programmes central to fungal virulence, morphogenesis and drug resistance. In pathogenic fungi ...

Illustration of H2B or H3 tail-less nucleosomes. Nucleosomes lacking H2B and H3 tails exhibit weakened interactions between histone tails and nucleosomal DNA, leading to less stable nucleosome ...

In plants and animals, the basic packaging units of DNA, which carry genetic information, are the so-called nucleosomes. A nucleosome consists of a segment of DNA wound around eight proteins known as ...

The serine 31 (Ser31) phosphorylation modification (H3.3S31ph) in the N-terminal tail of the histone variant H3.3 can transform H3.3 nucleosomes from a stable state to a dynamically activated ...

Chemical changes to histones, the proteins that help to pack and organize DNA inside cells, play a key role in determining what genes will be consistently activated over the course of an animal or ...

Modification of histone tails, by acetylation, methylation or phosphorylation, affects the local chromatin structure and the transcriptional regulation of adjacent genes. Pericentric heterochromatin ...

In the quiet world of plant molecular biology, few questions are as consequential as how an ordinary leaf cell can be persuaded to abandon its identity and start life over again as an embryo. A new ...

In a recent study published in the journal Science Advances, a group of researchers investigated the role of histone modifications in human aging by developing and evaluating histone-specific age ...