Kolasinska-Zwierz Paulina, Down Thomas, Latorre Isabel, Liu Tao, Liu X Shirley, Ahringer Julie
The Gurdon Institute and Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QN, UK.
Nat Genet. 2009 Mar;41(3):376-81. doi: 10.1038/ng.322. Epub 2009 Feb 1.
Variation in patterns of methylations of histone tails reflects and modulates chromatin structure and function. To provide a framework for the analysis of chromatin function in Caenorhabditis elegans, we generated a genome-wide map of histone H3 tail methylations. We find that C. elegans genes show distributions of histone modifications that are similar to those of other organisms, with H3K4me3 near transcription start sites, H3K36me3 in the body of genes and H3K9me3 enriched on silent genes. We also observe a novel pattern: exons are preferentially marked with H3K36me3 relative to introns. H3K36me3 exon marking is dependent on transcription and is found at lower levels in alternatively spliced exons, supporting a splicing-related marking mechanism. We further show that the difference in H3K36me3 marking between exons and introns is evolutionarily conserved in human and mouse. We propose that H3K36me3 exon marking in chromatin provides a dynamic link between transcription and splicing.
组蛋白尾部甲基化模式的变化反映并调节染色质的结构和功能。为了提供一个分析秀丽隐杆线虫染色质功能的框架，我们绘制了全基因组范围的组蛋白H3尾部甲基化图谱。我们发现，秀丽隐杆线虫基因的组蛋白修饰分布与其他生物相似，转录起始位点附近有H3K4me3，基因内部有H3K36me3，沉默基因上富集H3K9me3。我们还观察到一种新模式：相对于内含子，外显子优先被H3K36me3标记。H3K36me3外显子标记依赖于转录，并且在可变剪接的外显子中水平较低，这支持了一种与剪接相关的标记机制。我们进一步表明，外显子和内含子之间H3K36me3标记的差异在人类和小鼠中是进化保守的。我们提出，染色质中的H3K36me3外显子标记在转录和剪接之间提供了一个动态联系。
