Honors College Theses

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Role of Chromatin Structure in Regulating Transcription
Adamczyk, Sarah; Govind, Chhabi
Histone chaperones are a class of proteins that assemble nucleosomes, a fundamental unit of chromatin, after DNA replication. Some of these chaperones play an important role in restoring chromatin structure, which is disrupted by DNA-dependent activities, including gene-transcription, in cells. Histone chaperones like Spt6 maintain the chromatin structure to keep genes and their functions stable by removing nucleosomal barriers and facilitating reassembly, to allow Polymerase II to read DNA. In this study, we observed the nucleosome changes upon the deletion of the Sh2 domain of Spt6 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In this study, we show that the Sh2 domain is important in regulating chromatin structure on a genome-wide scale. Without the Sh2 domain, higher occupancy of nucleosomes is observed even at highly transcribed genes. The Sh2 domain is also important in maintaining the targeting of Spt6 in the genome and without this domain present, we found there was an absence of Spt6 in highly transcribed genes. Loss of Sh2 domain function is adverse for nucleosome positioning, disrupting the original chromatin structure and shows that Spt6 is important in the organization of chromatin during transcription.