Properties of repression condensates in living Ciona embryos
Nicholas Treen,
Shunsuke F. Shimobayashi,
Jorine Eeftens,
Clifford P. Brangwynne and
Michael Levine ()
Additional contact information
Nicholas Treen: Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University
Shunsuke F. Shimobayashi: Princeton University
Jorine Eeftens: Princeton University
Clifford P. Brangwynne: Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University
Michael Levine: Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University
Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-9
Abstract:
Abstract Recent studies suggest that transcriptional activators and components of the pre-initiation complex (PIC) form higher order associations—clusters or condensates—at active loci. Considerably less is known about the distribution of repressor proteins responsible for gene silencing. Here, we develop an expression assay in living Ciona embryos that captures the liquid behavior of individual nucleoli undergoing dynamic fusion events. The assay is used to visualize puncta of Hes repressors, along with the Groucho/TLE corepressor. We observe that Hes.a/Gro puncta have the properties of viscous liquid droplets that undergo limited fusion events due to association with DNA. Hes.a mutants that are unable to bind DNA display hallmarks of liquid–liquid phase separation, including dynamic fusions of individual condensates to produce large droplets. We propose that the DNA template serves as a scaffold for the formation of Hes condensates, but limits the spread of transcriptional repressors to unwanted regions of the genome.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21606-5 Abstract (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-21606-5
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21606-5
Access Statistics for this article
Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie
More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().