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Histone H3 lysine 4 methylation (H3K4me) has been proposed as a critical component in regulating gene expression, epigenetic states, and cellular identities1. The biological meaning of H3K4me is interpreted by conserved modules including plant homeodomain (PHD) fingers that recognize varied H3K4me states. The dysregulation of PHD fingers has been implicated in several human diseases, including cancers and immune or neurological disorders. Here we report that fusing an H3K4-trimethylation (H3K4me3)-binding PHD finger, such as the carboxy-terminal PHD finger of PHF23 or JARID1A (also known as KDM5A or RBBP2), to a common fusion partner nucleoporin-98 (NUP98) as identified in human leukaemias, generated potent oncoproteins that arrested haematopoietic differentiation and induced acute myeloid leukaemia in murine models. In these processes, a PHD finger that specifically recognizes H3K4me3/2 marks was essential for leukaemogenesis. Mutations in PHD fingers that abrogated H3K4me3 binding also abolished leukaemic transformation. NUP98-PHD fusion prevented the differentiation-associated removal of H3K4me3 at many loci encoding lineage-specific transcription factors (Hox(s), Gata3, Meis1, Eya1 and Pbx1), and enforced their active gene transcription in murine haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells. Mechanistically, NUP98-PHD fusions act as 'chromatin boundary factors', dominating over polycomb-mediated gene silencing to 'lock' developmentally critical loci into an active chromatin state (H3K4me3 with induced histone acetylation), a state that defined leukaemia stem cells. Collectively, our studies represent, to our knowledge, the first report that deregulation of the PHD finger, an 'effector' of specific histone modification, perturbs the epigenetic dynamics on developmentally critical loci, catastrophizes cellular fate decision-making, and even causes oncogenesis during mammalian development.
Pubmed ID: 19430464 RIS Download
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Biomedical technology resource center that develops software and web-based resources for the visualization and analysis of molecular structure, and related data, at scales ranging from the atomic to the supramolecular. They create tools for handling and integrating diverse types of biomolecular data, including atomic-resolution coordinates, density maps, sequences, annotations, and networks. Their primary efforts are in the visualization and analysis of structures of molecules and molecular assemblies, enzyme sequence-structure-function relationships, and network representations of protein similarity, binding interactions, and biological pathways. They provide technologies to enable identifying the molecular bases of disease and phenotypic variation, annotating proteins of unknown function, identifying targets for drug development, designing drugs, and engineering proteins with new functions. RBVI distributes software tools, including the popular UCSF Chimera visualization and analysis package, develops and hosts the Structure-Function Linkage Database, and provides access to state-of-the-art computational resources in support of research projects in these areas.
View all literature mentionsOpen source Java based image processing software program designed for scientific multidimensional images. ImageJ has been transformed to ImageJ2 application to improve data engine to be sufficient to analyze modern datasets.
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