The Nucleosome (Ada and Don Olins)

The Nucleosome is the basic building unit of chromatin. It consists out of 147 base pairs of double stranded DNA wrapped around the Histone core octamer that consists out of 2 copies of each dimer of H2A/H2B, and H3/H4. Nucleosomes are organized like "beads on a string" to form a modifiable regulatory basis for higher order structures of chromatin. The first images of the nucleosome as a particle was published by our guests Ada and Don Olins from the University of New England in 1974 (Olins, A. L. & Olins, D. E. Spheroid Chromatin Units (ν Bodies). Science 183, 330–332 (1974).). This observation lead the way to numerous discoveries around chromatin which ultimately culminated in the discovery of the 2.8 Angstrom high-resolution crystal structure 20 years ago in the year 1997 (Luger, K., Mäder, A. W., Richmond, R. K., Sargent, D. F. & Richmond, T. J. Crystal structure of the nucleosome core particle at 2.8 Å resolution. Nature 389, 251–260 (1997).)

References for this episode

• Ada L. Olins, Donald E. Olins. Spheroid Chromatin Units (ν Bodies). Science. 25 Jan 1974: Vol. 183, Issue 4122, pp. 330-332. DOI: 10.1126/science.183.4122.330
• Ada L. Olins, Donald E. Olins, et al. An epichromatin epitope. Nucleus. 2011 Jan-Feb; 2(1): 47–60. DOI: 10.4161/nucl.2.1.13271

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