Novel histones and histone variant families in prokaryotes
Schwab, S.; Boyle, A. L.; Dame, R. T.
Show abstract
Histones are important chromatin-organizing proteins in eukaryotes and archaea. They form superhelical structures around which DNA is wrapped. Recent studies have shown that some archaea and bacteria contain alternative histones that exhibit different DNA binding properties, in addition to highly divergent sequences. However, the vast majority of these new histones are identified in metagenomes and thus are difficult to study in vivo. The recent revolutionary breakthroughs in computational protein structure prediction by AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAfold allow for unprecedented insights into the potential function and structure of previously uncharacterized proteins. Here, we categorize the prokaryotic histone space into 17 distinct groups based on AlphaFold2 predictions. We identify a new superfamily of histones, termed 3 histones, which are common in archaea and present in several bacteria. Importantly, we establish the existence of a large family of histones throughout archaea and in some bacteriophages that, instead of wrapping DNA, bridge DNA, thereby diverging from conventional nucleosomal histones.
Matching journals
The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Dissecting the Contribution of Transposable Elements to Interphase Chromosome Structure 93%
- ARTEM: a method for RNA and DNA tertiary motif identification with backbone permutations, and its example application to kink-turn-like motifs 93%
- DNA polymerase stalling at structured DNA constrains the expansion of Short Tandem Repeats 93%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- The structure of a Type III-A CRISPR-Cas effector complex reveals conserved and idiosyncratic contacts to target RNA and crRNA among Type III-A systems 94%
- Analysis of subunit folding contribution of three yeast large ribosomal subunit proteins required for stabilisation and processing of intermediate nuclear rRNA precursors. 92%
- An updated compendium and reevaluation of the evidence for nuclear transcription factor occupancy over the mitochondrial genome 91%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.