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Updated: Jul 11, 2025

Deciphering Molecular Mechanism of Histone Assembly by DNA Curtain Technique
Published on: March 9, 2022
Modus operandi: Chromatin recognition by α-helical histone readers
Hossein Davarinejad1, Alexis Arvanitis-Vigneault1, Dallas Nygard1
1Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology, Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, 451 Smyth Road, Ottawa, ON K1H 8M5, Canada.
Abstract:
Histone reader domains provide a mechanism for sensing states of coordinated nuclear processes marked by histone proteins' post-translational modifications (PTMs). Among a growing number of discovered histone readers, the 14-3-3s, ankyrin repeat domains (ARDs), tetratricopeptide repeats (TPRs), bromodomains (BRDs), and HEAT domains are a group of domains using various mechanisms to recognize unmodified or modified histones, yet they all are composed of an α-helical fold. In this review, we compare how these readers fold to create protein domains that are very diverse in their tertiary structures, giving rise to intriguing peptide binding mechanisms resulting in vastly different footprints of their targets.
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