Nucleosome interactions in chromatin: fiber stiffening and hairpin formation

We use Monte Carlo simulations to study attractive and excluded volume interactions between nucleosome core particles in 30-nm chromatin fibers. The nucleosomes are treated as disklike objects having an excluded volume and short-range attraction modeled by a variant of the Gay-Berne potential. The nucleosomes are connected via bendable and twistable linker DNA in the crossed linker fashion. We investigate the influence of the nucleosomal excluded volume on the stiffness of the fiber. For parameter values that correspond to chicken erythrocyte chromatin, we find that the persistence length is governed to a large extent by that excluded volume whereas the soft linker backbone elasticity plays only a minor role. We further find that internucleosomal attraction can induce the formation of hairpin configurations. Tension-induced opening of such configurations into straight fibers manifests itself in a quasiplateau in the force-extension curve that resembles results from recent micromanipulation experiments. Such hairpins may play a role in the formation of higher-order structures in chromosomes like chromonema fibers.