The role of protein arginine methylation in the formation of silent chromatin

Michael C. Yu; Dudley W. Lamming; Julian A. Eskin; David A. Sinclair; Pamela A. Silver

doi:10.1101/gad.1495206

The role of protein arginine methylation in the formation of silent chromatin

¹ Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
² Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

Abstract

Establishment and maintenance of silent chromatin in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae involves a step-wise assembly of the SIR complex. Here we demonstrate a role for the protein arginine methyltransferase Hmt1 in this process. In the absence of catalytically active Hmt1, yeast cells display increased transcription from silent chromatin regions and increased mitotic recombination within tandem repeats of rDNA. At the molecular level, loss of Hmt1’s catalytic activity results in decreased Sir2 and dimethylated Arg-3 histone H4 occupancy across silent chromatin regions. These data suggest a model whereby protein arginine methylation affects the establishment and maintenance of silent chromatin.

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Footnotes

↵3 Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, 109 Cooke Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
↵4 Corresponding authors.

↵4 E-MAIL pamela_silver{at}hms.harvard.edu; FAX (617) 432-6405.
↵5 E-MAIL david_sinclair{at}hms.harvard.edu; FAX (617) 432-3932.
Article is online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1495206
- Received April 11, 2006.
- Accepted October 23, 2006.