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Updated: Sep 28, 2025

Sequential Salt Extractions for the Analysis of Bulk Chromatin Binding Properties of Chromatin Modifying Complexes
Published on: October 2, 2017
Sperm chromatin structure: Insights from in vitro to in situ experiments
1Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, The University of Tokyo, 1-1-1 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0032, Japan.
Abstract:
The sperm genome is tightly packed into a minimal volume of sperm nuclei. Sperm chromatin is highly condensed by protamines (PRMs) after histone-protamine replacement, and the majority of the sperm genome forms a nucleo-protamine structure, namely, the PRM-DNA complex. The outline of sperm chromatin structure was proposed 30 years ago, and the details have been explored by approaches from several independent research fields including male reproduction and infertility, DNA biopolymer, and most recently, genome-wide sequence-based approaches. In this review, the history of research on sperm chromatin structure is briefly described, and the progress of recent related studies is summarized to obtain a more integrated view for the sperm chromatin, an extremely compacted "black box."
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