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Reply to “CENP-A octamers do not confer a reduction in nucleosome height by AFM”

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology volume 21, pages 5–8 (2014)Cite this article

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Miell et al. reply:

Previous studies from the Dalal and Henikoff groups compared atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements of heights of nucleosomes containing histone H3 and CENP-A from chromatin arrays that had been extracted from human or Drosophila cells and enriched by immunoprecipitation1,2,3,4. In each study, CENP-A nucleosomes were observed to be lower in height than were H3 nucleosomes, and the authors concluded that CENP-A nucleosomes are tetrameric hemisomes with one copy of each histone—half the components of regular octameric H3 nucleosomes. To date, the suggestion that CENP-A nucleosomes are hemisomal in vivo remains heavily reliant on AFM data and has proven controversial because it conflicts with several in vitro and in vivo studies demonstrating that CENP-A nucleosomes contain CENP-A dimers and are octameric, as are all other known histone-variant nucleosomes5.

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Figure 1: Variability in the distribution of nucleosome heights measured with AFM.

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Author notes

  1. Matthew D D Miell

    Present address: Present address: Department of Biochemistry, Stanford Medical School, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology and Institute of Cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Matthew D D Miell & Robin C Allshire

  2. Department of Biochemistry, Stanford Medical School, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Aaron F Straight

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  1. Matthew D D Miell
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Correspondence to Robin C Allshire.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

Population averages and spreads for nucleosome heights measured using AFM (PDF 374 kb)

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Miell, M., Straight, A. & Allshire, R. Reply to “CENP-A octamers do not confer a reduction in nucleosome height by AFM”. Nat Struct Mol Biol 21, 5–8 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2744

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