Journal of Undergraduate Research
Keywords
histone modifications, nucleosome positioning, gene expression
College
Life Sciences
Department
Microbiology and Molecular Biology
Abstract
Nucleosome positioning plays an important role in gene regulation and expression. Nucleosomes consist of DNA-histone interactions that comprise the first order of DNA compaction into chromatin in the cell. Modifications to the histone in the nucleosome have been hypothesized to influence the location of the nucleosome on the DNA and therefore the regulation of the gene the nucleosome is forming on. In our original proposal, we proposed to show the effects that different modifications had on the position of the nucleosome on the DNA and the DNA sequence that had the highest affinity for nucleosome formation given a specific histone modification. A critical part of this experiment involves shearing the genomic DNA down to a functional size to work with. While planning our experiments we realized that the shearing process may not be random, but instead be a source of bias. In the event of a shearing bias, our nucleosome reconstitutions using the DNA fragments from our shearing would reflect the bias and potentially result in erroneous conclusions. Given this new question we realized that the randomness of DNA shearing needed to be addressed before we could proceed and thus we designed a series of experiments to determine whether or not DNA shearing was, in fact, random.
Recommended Citation
Ritchie, Jordon and Johnson, Steven
(2015)
"Histone Modifications and their Effects on Nucleosome Positioning and Gene Expression,"
Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 2015:
Iss.
1, Article 144.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jur/vol2015/iss1/144