Fine mapping of chromatin structure in Drosophila melanogaster embryos using micrococcal nuclease

Drosophila Brahma complex remodels nucleosome organizations in multiple aspects

ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling complexes regulate nucleosome organizations. In Drosophila, gene Brm encodes the core Brahma complex, the ATPase subunit of SWI/SNF class of chromatin remodelers. Its role in modulating the nucleosome landscape in vivo is unclear. In this study, we knocked down Brm in Drosophila third instar larvae to explore the changes in nucleosome profiles and global gene transcription. The results show that Brm knockdown leads to nucleosome occupancy changes throughout the entire genome with a bias in occupancy decrease. In contrast, the knockdown has limited impacts on nucleosome position shift. The knockdown also alters another important physical property of nucleosome positioning, fuzziness. Nucleosome position shift, gain or loss and fuzziness changes are all enriched in promoter regions. Nucleosome arrays around the 5' ends of genes are reorganized in five patterns as a result of Brm knockdown. Intriguingly, the concomitant changes in the genes adjacent to the Brahma-dependent remodeling regions have important roles in development and morphogenesis. Further analyses reveal abundance of AT-rich motifs for transcription factors in the remodeling regions.

Heat shock reduces stalled RNA polymerase II and nucleosome turnover genome-wide

Heat shock rapidly induces expression of a subset of genes while globally repressing transcription, making it an attractive system to study alterations in the chromatin landscape that accompany changes in gene regulation. We characterized these changes in Drosophila cells by profiling classical low-salt-soluble chromatin, RNA polymerase II (Pol II), and nucleosome turnover dynamics at single-base-pair resolution. With heat shock, low-salt-soluble chromatin and stalled Pol II levels were found to decrease within gene bodies, but no overall changes were detected at transcriptional start sites. Strikingly, nucleosome turnover decreased genome-wide within gene bodies upon heat shock in a pattern similar to that observed with inhibition of Pol II elongation, especially at genes involved in the heat-shock response. Relatively high levels of nucleosome turnover were also observed throughout the bodies of genes with paused Pol II. These observations suggest that down-regulation of transcription during heat shock involves reduced nucleosome mobility and that this process has evolved to promote heat-shock gene regulation. Our ability to precisely map both nucleosomal and subnucleosomal particles directly from low-salt-soluble chromatin extracts to assay changes in the chromatin landscape provides a simple general strategy for epigenome characterization.

Long- and short-range transcriptional repressors induce distinct chromatin states on repressed genes

Transcriptional repression is essential for establishing precise patterns of gene expression during development. Repressors governing early Drosophila segmentation can be classified as short- or long-range factors based on their ranges of action, acting either locally to quench adjacent activators or broadly to silence an entire locus. Paradoxically, these repressors recruit common corepressors, Groucho and CtBP, despite their different ranges of repression. To reveal the mechanisms underlying these two distinct modes of repression, we performed chromatin analysis using the prototypical long-range repressor Hairy and the short-range repressor Knirps. Chromatin immunoprecipitation and micrococcal nuclease mapping studies reveal that Knirps causes local changes of histone density and acetylation, and the inhibition of activator recruitment, without affecting the recruitment of basal transcriptional machinery. In contrast, Hairy induces widespread histone deacetylation and inhibits the recruitment of basal machinery without inducing chromatin compaction. Our study provides detailed mechanistic insight into short- and long-range repression on selected endogenous target genes and suggests that the transcriptional corepressors can be differentially deployed to mediate chromatin changes in a context-dependent manner.