Complex Relationships between Chromatin Accessibility, Sequence Divergence, and Gene Expression in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Variation in regulatory DNA is thought to drive phenotypic variation, evolution, and disease. Prior studies of regulatory DNA and transcription factors across animal species highlighted a fundamental conundrum: Transcription factor binding domains and cognate binding sites are conserved, while regulatory DNA sequences are not. It remains unclear how conserved transcription factors and dynamic regulatory sites produce conserved expression patterns across species. Here, we explore regulatory DNA variation and its functional consequences within Arabidopsis thaliana, using chromatin accessibility to delineate regulatory DNA genome-wide. Unlike in previous cross-species comparisons, the positional homology of regulatory DNA is maintained among A. thaliana ecotypes and less nucleotide divergence has occurred. Of the ∼50,000 regulatory sites in A. thaliana, we found that 15% varied in accessibility among ecotypes. Some of these accessibility differences were associated with extensive, previously unannotated sequence variation, encompassing many deletions and ancient hypervariable alleles. Unexpectedly, for the majority of such regulatory sites, nearby gene expression was unaffected. Nevertheless, regulatory sites with high levels of sequence variation and differential chromatin accessibility were the most likely to be associated with differential gene expression. Finally, and most surprising, we found that the vast majority of differentially accessible sites show no underlying sequence variation. We argue that these surprising results highlight the necessity to consider higher-order regulatory context in evaluating regulatory variation and predicting its phenotypic consequences.

The minimum information required for reporting a molecular interaction experiment (MIMIx).

A wealth of molecular interaction data is available in the literature, ranging from large-scale datasets to a single interaction confirmed by several different techniques. These data are all too often reported either as free text or in tables of variable format, and are often missing key pieces of information essential for a full understanding of the experiment. Here we propose MIMIx, the minimum information required for reporting a molecular interaction experiment. Adherence to these reporting guidelines will result in publications of increased clarity and usefulness to the scientific community and will support the rapid, systematic capture of molecular interaction data in public databases, thereby improving access to valuable interaction data.

Ctf3p, the Mis6 budding yeast homolog, interacts with Mcm22p and Mcm16p at the yeast outer kinetochore.

The budding yeast kinetochore is composed of an inner and outer protein complex, which binds to centromere (CEN) DNA and attaches to microtubules. We performed a genetic synthetic dosage lethality screen to identify novel kinetochore proteins in a collection of chromosome transmission fidelity mutants. Our screen identified several new kinetochore-related proteins including YLR381Wp/Ctf3p, which is a member of a conserved family of centromere-binding proteins. Ctf3p interacts with Mcm22p, Mcm16p, and the outer kinetochore protein Ctf19p. We used chromatin immunoprecipitation to demonstrate that Ctf3p, Mcm22p, and Mcm16p bind to CEN DNA in a Ctf19p-dependent manner. In addition, Ctf3p, Mcm22p, and Mcm16p have a localization pattern similar to other kinetochore proteins. The fission yeast Ctf3p homolog, Mis6, is required for loading of a CENP-A centromere specific histone, Cnp1, onto centromere DNA. We find however that Ctf3p is not required for loading of the budding yeast CENP-A homolog, Cse4p, onto CEN DNA. In contrast, Ctf3p and Ctf19p fail to bind properly to the centromere in a cse4-1 mutant strain. We conclude that the requirements for CENP-A loading onto centromere DNA differ in fission versus budding yeast.