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Basic units of chromatin structure. A nucleosome is the basic structural unit of DNA packaging in eukaryotes. The structure of a nucleosome consists of a segment of DNA wound around eight histone proteins [1] and resembles thread wrapped around a spool. The nucleosome is the fundamental subunit of chromatin.
Histone H1 protein binds to the site where DNA enters and exits the nucleosome, wrapping 147 base pairs around the histone core and stabilising the nucleosome, [3] this structure is a chromatosome. [4] In the solenoid structure, the nucleosomes fold up and are stacked, forming a helix.
The precise structure of the chromatin fiber in the cell is not known in detail. [10] This level of chromatin structure is thought to be the form of heterochromatin, which contains mostly transcriptionally silent genes. Electron microscopy studies have demonstrated that the 30 nm fiber is highly dynamic such that it unfolds into a 10 nm fiber ...
Histones: DNA is wrapped around histones to form nucleosomes, which are basic units of chromatin structure. Each nucleosome consists of 8 histone protein subunits, around which roughly 147 DNA base pairs are wrapped in 1.67 left-handed turns. Nucleosomes provide about 7-fold initial linear compaction of DNA. [15]
The chemical structure of DNA is insufficient to understand the complexity of the 3D structures of DNA. In contrast, animated molecular models allow one to visually explore the three-dimensional (3D) structure of DNA. The DNA model shown (far right) is a space-filling, or CPK, model of the DNA double helix. Animated molecular models, such as ...
Thus, the entire chromosome, i.e. chromatin in eukaryotes consists of such nucleoproteins. [2] [13] In eukaryotic cells, DNA is associated with about an equal mass of histone proteins in a highly condensed nucleoprotein complex called chromatin. [14]
MNase digestion of chromatin was key to early studies of chromatin structure; being used to determine that each nucleosomal unit of chromatin was composed of approximately 200bp of DNA. [13] This, alongside Olins’ and Olins’ “beads on a string” model, [14] confirmed Kornberg’s ideas regarding the basic chromatin structure. [15]
This structure consists of approximately 146 bp of DNA wrapped around a nucleosome, an octamer composed of pairs of each of the four core histones (H2A, H2B, H3, and H4). The chromatin fiber is further compacted through the interaction of a linker histone, H1, with the DNA between the nucleosomes to form higher order chromatin structures.