Domains in Chromatin Structure
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The last years have witnessed rapid progress in our understanding of chromatin structure at the nucleosome or beads-on-a-string level (Elgin and Weintraub 1975; Kornberg 1977). Higher orders of chromatin structure have attracted some attention, but here the picture is still far from clear. A coiling of the chromatin filament has been suggested (Finch and Klug 1976; Carpenter et al. 1976); a supercoil or solenoid may be formed with a pitch of 110 Å and a diameter of about 300 Å which correlates with the diameter of the chromatin fibers as observed in electron micrographs (Finch and Klug 1976; see also brief review by Davies 1976), The knobby structure of the 250–300-Å chromatin fibers frequently seen in electron micrographs has recently also been discussed in terms of a globular condensation of nucleosomes (Renz et al. 1977). A further spiralization of the 250–300-Å fibers into a “supersolenoid” of 4000-Å diameter was postulated...
