H2A.B facilitates transcription elongation at methylated CpG loci
- 1Division of Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Department of Internal Medicine,
- 2Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA
Abstract
H2A.B is a unique histone H2A variant that only exists in mammals. Here we found that H2A.B is ubiquitously expressed in major organs. Genome-wide analysis of H2A.B in mouse ES cells shows that H2A.B is associated with methylated DNA in gene body regions. Moreover, H2A.B-enriched gene loci are actively transcribed. One typical example is that H2A.B is enriched in a set of differentially methylated regions at imprinted loci and facilitates transcription elongation. These results suggest that H2A.B positively regulates transcription elongation by overcoming DNA methylation in the transcribed region. It provides a novel mechanism by which transcription is regulated at DNA hypermethylated regions.
Footnotes
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↵3 Corresponding author
E-mail xiayu{at}umich.edu
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.156877.113.
- Received February 27, 2013.
- Accepted January 7, 2014.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
