Chromosome structure dynamics during the cell cycle: a structure to fit every phase
Authors: Christopher Barrington, Dubravka Pezic, Suzana Hadjur
First published: 4 September 2017Full publication history
See also: L Lazar-Stefanita et al (September 2017) Y Kakui et al (2017),
SA Schalbetter et al (September 2017), T Nagano et al (July 2017)
Figure 1. Chromosome structures and SMC proteins during the cell cycle
Abstract
Chromosomes undergo dramatic morphological changes as cells advance through the cell cycle. Using powerful molecular and computational methods, several recent studies revealed an outstanding complexity of continuous structural changes accompanying cell cycle progression. In agreement with cell division being a fundamental cellular process, characteristic features of cell cycle stage-specific genome structure are conserved from yeast to mouse. These studies further shine light on the critical roles that SMC complexes, already well known as fundamental regulators of chromosome topology, have in orchestrating structural dynamics throughout the cell cycle.
Molecular methods such as Hi-C measure physical contacts between DNA fragments in an unbiased and genome-wide manner (Lieberman Aiden et al, 2009), permitting researchers to describe the higher-order folding principles of chromosomes with great resolution and in a high throughput manner (Dixon et al, 2012; Nora et al, 2012; Sexton et al, 2012). Four recent studies have harnessed the power of Hi-C and its statistical analyses to further our understanding of the dramatic structural changes that occur within chromosomes during cell cycle progression. Collectively, the work in Schizosaccharomyces pombe (Kakui et al, 2017), Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Lazar-Stefanita et al, 2017; Schalbetter et al, 2017) and mouse ES cells (Nagano et al, 2017) has revealed distinct cell cycle stage chromosome structures, the importance of structural maintenance of chromosome (SMC) proteins throughout this process and the conservation of structural features between species.
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