Methylation of histones at specific residues plays an important role in transcriptional regulation. Chromatin immunoprecipitation of dimethylated lysine 9 on histone H3 across 53 kilobases of the chicken beta-globin locus during erythropoiesis shows an almost complete anticorrelation between regions of elevated lysine 9 methylation and acetylation. Lysine 9 is methylated most over constitutive ...

Butyrate, a four-carbon fatty acid, and its two-carbon metabolic product, acetate, are inducers of gamma-globin synthesis. To test whether other short-chain fatty acids share this property, we first examined whether propionic acid, a three-carbon fatty acid that is not catabolized to acetate, induces gamma-globin expression. Sodium propionate increased the frequency of fetal hemoglobin containi...

Transcripts of most intron-bearing cellular genes must be processed by the splicing machinery in order to efficiently accumulate and gain access to the cytoplasm. However, we found that herpes simplex virus induces cytoplasmic accumulation of both spliced and unspliced polyadenylated alpha-globin RNAs in infected HeLa cells. Accumulation of the unspliced RNA required the immediate-early protein...

Studies on assembly in vitro of alpha-globin chains with recombinant beta16 Gly-->Asp, beta95 Lys-->Glu, beta120 Lys-->Glu and beta16 Gly-->Asp, 120 Lys-->Glu human beta-globin chain variants in addition to human betaA- and betaS-globin chains were performed to evaluate effects of increased anionic charge in the beta chain on hemoglobin assembly using soluble recombinant beta-globin chains expr...

To study epigenetic regulation of the human beta-globin locus during hematopoiesis, we investigated patterns of histone modification and chromatin accessibility along this locus in hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPCs) derived from both humans and transgenic mice. We demonstrate that the developmentally related activation of human beta-like globin genes in humans and transgenic mice HPCs is pre...

Posttranslational modifications of transcription factors provide alternate protein interaction platforms that lead to varied downstream effects. We have investigated how the acetylation of EKLF plays a role in its ability to alter the beta-like globin locus chromatin structure and activate transcription of the adult beta-globin gene. By establishing an EKLF-null erythroid line whose closed beta...

The human α-globin gene cluster is located on chromosome 16 pterp13.3, and is arranged in the order, 5’ζ2-ψζ1-ψα2-ψα1-α2-α1-θ1-3’. Recent reexamination of the ψα2 gene revealed that it is expressed at a very low level, and was renamed as mu-globin gene. The cluster was thought to result from duplication events that occurred more than 300 million years ago. Unequal homologous recombinations are ...

Peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) can bind to homopurine/homopyrimidine sequences of double-stranded DNA targets in a sequence-specific manner and form [PNA]2/DNA triplexes with single-stranded DNA D-loop structures at the PNA binding sites. These D-loop structures have been found to have a capacity to initiate transcription in vitro. If this strategy can be used to induce transcription of endogenou...

The beta-globin locus control region (LCR) is the founding member of a novel class of cis-acting regulatory elements that confer high level, tissue-specific, site-of-integration-independent, copy number-dependent expression on linked transgenes located in ectopic chromatin sites. Knowledge from beta-globin and other LCR studies has shed light on our understanding of the long-range interaction b...

OBJECTIVE Four combinations of five neutral sequence changes at rs713040, rs10768683, rs7480526, rs7946748, and rs1609812 occurring in the human beta globin gene defined as frameworks have been reported in beta globin gene. Here we report for the frequency of these frameworks in thalassemia major patients of North Iran. METHODS Beta globin gene frameworks of 46 thalassemia major patients of N...