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Updated: Aug 7, 2025

Assembly of Nucleosomal Arrays from Recombinant Core Histones and Nucleosome Positioning DNA
Published on: September 10, 2013
Are extraordinary nucleosome structures more ordinary than we thought?
1Department of Biological Sciences and Centre for BioImaging Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117543, Singapore.
Abstract:
The nucleosome is a DNA-protein assembly that is the basic unit of chromatin. A nucleosome can adopt various structures. In the canonical nucleosome structure, 145-147 bp of DNA is wrapped around a histone heterooctamer. The strong histone-DNA interactions cause the DNA to be inaccessible for nuclear processes such as transcription. Therefore, the canonical nucleosome structure has to be altered into different, non-canonical structures to increase DNA accessibility. While it is recognised that non-canonical structures do exist, these structures are not well understood. In this review, we discuss both the evidence for various non-canonical nucleosome structures in the nucleus and the factors that are believed to induce these structures. The wide range of non-canonical structures is likely to regulate the amount of accessible DNA, and thus have important nuclear functions.
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