Organização nuclear e a compensação de dosagem

terça-feira, novembro 02, 2010

Nuclear Organization and Dosage Compensation

Jennifer C. Chow and Edith Heard

- Author Affiliations

Mammalian Developmental Epigenetics Group, Institut Curie, CNRS UMR3215, INSERM U934, Paris, F-75248 France
Correspondence: Edith.Heard@curie.fr

Abstract

Dosage compensation is a strategy to deal with the imbalance of sex chromosomal gene products relative to autosomes and also between the sexes. The mechanisms that ensure dosage compensation for X-chromosome activity have been extensively studied in mammals, worms, and flies. Although each entails very different mechanisms to equalize the dose of X-linked genes between the sexes, they all involve the co-ordinate regulation of hundreds of genes specifically on the sex chromosomes and not the autosomes. In addition to chromatin modifications and changes in higher order chromatin structure, nuclear organization is emerging as an important component of these chromosome-wide processes and in the specific targeting of dosage compensation complexes to the sex chromosomes. Preferential localization within the nucleus and 3D organization are thought to contribute to the differential treatment of two identical homologs within the same nucleus, as well as to the chromosome-wide spread and stable maintenance of heterochromatin.

Copyright © 2010 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; all rights reserved

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