Affiliation:
1. Georg-August University of Göttingen, Third Department of Zoology-Developmental Biology, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Linker histones are nonessential for the life of single-celled eukaryotes. Linker histones, however, can be important components of specific developmental programs in multicellular animals and plants. For
Caenorhabditis elegans
a single linker histone variant (H1.1) is essential in a chromatin silencing process which is crucial for the proliferation and differentiation of the hermaphrodite germ line. In this study we analyzed the whole linker histone complement of
C. elegans
by telomeric position effect variegation in budding yeast. In this assay an indicator gene (
URA3
) placed close to the repressive telomeric chromatin structure is subject to epigenetically inherited gene inactivation. Just one out of seven
C. elegans
linker histones (H1.1) was able to enhance the telomeric position effect in budding yeast. Since these results reflect the biological function of H1.1 in
C. elegans
, we suggest that chromatin silencing in
C. elegans
is governed by molecular mechanisms related to the telomere-dependent silencing in budding yeast. We confirmed this hypothesis by testing
C. elegans
homologs of three yeast genes which are established modifiers of the yeast telomeric chromatin structure (
SIR2
,
SET1
, and
RAD17
) for their influence on repeat-dependent transgene silencing for
C. elegans
.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Subject
Cell Biology,Molecular Biology
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5. Basic local alignment search tool
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