Nucleosome dynamics: HMGB1 relaxes canonical nucleosome structure to facilitate estrogen receptor binding

High mobility group protein 1 (HMGB1) interacts with DNA and chromatin to influence the regulation of transcription, DNA repair and recombination. We show that HMGB1 alters the structure and stability of the canonical nucleosome (N) in a nonenzymatic, ATP-independent manner. Although estrogen receptor (ER) does not bind to its consensus estrogen response element within a nucleosome, HMGB1 restructures the nucleosome to facilitate strong ER binding. The isolated HMGB1-restructured nucleosomes (N' and N″) remain stable and exhibit characteristics distinctly different from the canonical nucleosome. These findings complement previous studies that showed (i) HMGB1 stimulates in vivo transcriptional activation at estrogen response elements and (ii) knock down of HMGB1 expression by siRNA precipitously reduced transcriptional activation. The findings indicate that one aspect of the mechanism of HMGB1 action involves a restructuring of the nucleosome that appears to relax structural constraints within the nucleosome.