Chromatin Regulation Team
Team Leader: Dr Jon Wilson
Location: Chester Beatty Laboratories, London
Section: Section of Structural Biology
A key event in the onset of many cancers is the breakdown of cellular processes involved in the initiation of the DNA replication and transcriptional phases of the cell cycle. At the molecular level these processes necessitate changes in chromatin packaging that allow the replication and transcription machinery to gain access to the DNA. The building block of chromatin is the nucleosome core particle (NCP) consisting of an octamer of histone proteins around which two turns of double stranded DNA are wound.
Significantly for cellular processes, chromatin is a highly dynamic structure. Various remodelling complexes modulate chromatin compactness and therefore the access of transcriptional and replicative enzymes to the DNA. Post-translational modifications on the tails of the histone proteins, including phosphorylation, acetylation and methylation, and the modification enzymes that are responsible for them, play an important signalling role in gene regulation. The persistence of these factors, determining patterns of gene expression through many cycles of replication, is called epigenetics.
We are using biophysical and structural methods to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying chromatin dynamics and epigenetic regulation.
In the Section of Structural Biology
