dBigH1, a second histone H1 in Drosophila, and the consequences for histone fold nomenclature

Recently, Pérez-Montero and colleagues (Developmental cell, 26: 578-590, 2013) described the occurrence of a new histone H1 variant (dBigH1) in Drosophila. The presence of unusual acidic amino acid patches at the N-terminal end of dBigH1 is in contrast to the arginine patches that exist at the N- and C-terminal domains of other histone H1-related proteins found in the sperm of some organisms. This departure from the strictly lysine-rich composition of the somatic histone H1 raises a question about the true definition of its protein members. Their minimal essential requirements appear to be the presence of a lysine- and alanine-rich, intrinsically disordered C-terminal domain, with a highly helicogenic potential upon binding to the linker DNA regions of chromatin. In metazoans, specific targeting of these regions is further achieved by a linker histone fold domain (LHFD), distinctively different from the characteristic core histone fold domain (CHFD) of the nucleosome core histones.