Related Experiment Videos
Histone deacetylases: silencers for hire
1Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, UK EH9 3JR.
Trends in Biochemical Sciences
|March 1, 2000
Abstract:
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.