Histone deacetylases: silencers for hire.

Over the past few years, the long-standing idea that covalent modification of chromatin can play a role in determining states of gene activity has been confirmed. Eukaryotic genes can be silenced by deacetylation of acetyl-lysine moieties in the N-terminal tails of histones. Recent work links histone deacetylases with an increasing number of repressors, suggesting that deacetylation might be a rather pervasive feature of transcriptional repression systems.