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Review
. 2021 Mar 19;433(6):166678.
doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2020.10.012. Epub 2020 Oct 14.

Contributions of Histone Variants in Nucleosome Structure and Function

Hitoshi Kurumizaka  1 , Tomoya Kujirai  2 , Yoshimasa Takizawa  2
Affiliations
Free article
Review

Contributions of Histone Variants in Nucleosome Structure and Function

Hitoshi Kurumizaka et al. J Mol Biol. .
Free article

Abstract

Chromatin compacts genomic DNA in eukaryotes. The primary chromatin unit is the nucleosome core particle, composed of four pairs of the core histones, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4, and 145-147 base pairs of DNA. Since replication, recombination, repair, and transcription take place in chromatin, the structure and dynamics of the nucleosome must be versatile. These nucleosome characteristics underlie the epigenetic regulation of genomic DNA. In higher eukaryotes, many histone variants have been identified as non-allelic isoforms, which confer nucleosome diversity. In this article, we review the manifold types of nucleosomes produced by histone variants, which play important roles in the epigenetic regulation of chromatin.

Keywords: chromatin; epigenetics; histone variant; nucleosome; structure.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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