Genome packaging and expression.docVIP

/2002/3/5/reports/4014.1 Meeting report Genome packaging and expression Merlin Crossley Address: School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: M.Crossley@.au Published: 23 April 2002 GenomeBiology 2002, 3(5):reports4014.1–4014.3 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2002/3/5/reports/4014 ? BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) formation, using inhibitors and competitor peptides of A report on the 23rd Annual Lorne Conference on the Organization and Expression of the Genome, Lorne, Victoria, Australia, 17-21 February 2002. histone deacetylation. Heterochromatin: ‘that other chromatin’ takes center stage Now that so many genes have been catalogued, increasing attention is being paid to the behavior of chromosomal domains in the nucleus and how the molecular details of chromatin packaging fit with patterns of gene expression. Several aspects of these phenomena were discussed at this meeting. The terms euchromatin and heterochromatin have been useful for many years in describing the light-staining and more darkly staining regions of chromatin that are thought to be made up of mostly active loci and silent loci, respec- tively. Recently, the molecular definition of these regions has been improved and, in particular, advances in our under- standing of histones have been crucial. David Tremethick (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia) sum- marized our current knowledge of nucleosomal structure and how different histone modifications are thought to influ- ence the packaging of nucleosomes into condensed chro- matin. His work on the variant histone H2A.Z suggests that it mimics acetylated histone and promotes the formation of intermediate chromatin, which is a conformation thought to be p