Split decision: why it matters?

Abstract

The establishment and faithful maintenance of epigenetic information in the context of chromatin are crucial for a great number of biologic phenomena, including position effect variegation, Polycomb silencing, X-chromosome inactivation and genomic imprinting. However, mechanisms by which that the correct histone modification patterns propagate into daughter cells during mitotic divisions remain to be elucidated. The partitioning pattern of parental histone H3-H4 tetramers is a critical question toward our understanding of the epigenetic inheritance. In this review, we discuss why the histone H3-H4 tetramer split decision matters.

Keywords

histone / nucleosome / epigenetic inheritance

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Acknowledgements

This work in the laboratory of B. Z. is supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2007AA02Z1A6) and the Development Program for Basic Research of China (No. 2011CB965302).

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