Beauty of Chromatin Structure: Chromatin Accessibility / 中国生物化学与分子生物学报

ABSTRACT

Chromatin accessibility is one of the important indicators to evaluate the stability of chromatin structure, which is used to evaluate the binding ability of chromatin binding factors to chromosome DNA. It plays an important role in different nuclear processes, including gene transcription regulation and DNA damage repair. Abnormal regulation of chromatin accessibility is closely related to the occurrence and development of a variety of diseases, including tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, exploration of this attribute has become a hot spot in the field of life science and disease. More and more new technologies came into being, such as chromatin conformation capture, high-throughput sequencing, and the combination of these two technologies. With the progress of technology, more and more factors involved in the regulation of chromosome accessibility have been found and summarized, including nucleosome occupation, histone modification and non-coding RNA. A number of large-scale genomic data have drawn the chromatin accessibility map of a variety of diseases, which provides data support for revealing the relationship between the occurrence and development of diseases and chromatin accessibility. Meanwhile, with the development of single-cell chromatin accessibility sequencing technology, the investigation for division of cell types at chromatin level was achieved, which makes up for the deficiency of solely relying on gene expression for cell type division. This review will explain the development and prospect of the research about chromatin accessibility from the aspects of chromatin composition and accessibility, factors affecting chromatin accessibility, detection methods of chromatin accessibility, and its roles in cancer, briefly.