Genes, Volume 6, Issue 3

4-Coumarate:CoA ligase (4CL) genes are critical for the biosynthesis of plant phenylpropanoids. Here we identified 20 4CL genes in the genomes of two desert poplars (Populus euphratica and P. pruinosa) and salt-sensitive congener (P. trichocarpa), bu...

Herbaceous peony (Paeonia lactiflora Pall.), one of the world’s most important ornamental plants, is highly susceptible to Botrytis cinerea, and improving resistance to this pathogenic fungus is a problem yet to be solved. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an...

Altered DNA methylation patterns are found in many diseases, particularly in cancer, where the analysis of DNA methylation holds the promise to provide diagnostic, prognostic and predictive information of great clinical value. Methylation of the prom...

DNA replication is essential for cell division. Challenges to the progression of DNA polymerase can result in replication stress, promoting the stalling and ultimately collapse of replication forks. The latter involves the formation of DNA double-str...

Human activities significantly affect all ecosystems on the planet, including the assemblages that comprise our own microbiota. Over the last five million years, various evolutionary and ecological drivers have altered the composition of the human mi...

Mature B-cell lymphoma is a clinically and biologically highly diverse disease. Its diagnosis and prognosis is a challenge due to its molecular heterogeneity and diverse regimes of biological dysfunctions, which are partly driven by epigenetic mechan...

The spatial organization of metazoan genomes has a direct influence on fundamental nuclear processes that include transcription, replication, and DNA repair. It is imperative to understand the mechanisms that shape the 3D organization of the eukaryo...

Paternally expressed Insulin-like Growth Factor II (IGF2) encodes a gene whose protein product functions as a potent growth mitogen. Overexpression of IGF2 has been implicated in a wide number of disorders and diseases. IGF2 is regulated in part by d...

Histones are a major component of chromatin, the nucleoprotein complex fundamental to regulating transcription, facilitating cell division, and maintaining genome integrity in almost all eukaryotes. In addition to canonical, replication-dependent his...

Recent investigations on 3D chromatin folding revealed that the eukaryote genomes are both highly compartmentalized and extremely dynamic. This review presents the most recent advances in topological domains’ organization of the eukaryote genomes and...

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is the causal agent of a serious disease of swine. Here, we report the genome sequence of PRRSV strain HB-XL isolated from a pig farm with a clinical outbreak of porcine reproductive and res...

Histone variants are an important part of the histone contribution to chromatin epigenetics. In this review, we describe how the known structural differences of these variants from their canonical histone counterparts impart a chromatin signature ult...

Xanthomonas albilineans is the bacterium responsible for leaf scald, a lethal disease of sugarcane. Within the Xanthomonas genus, X. albilineans exhibits distinctive genomic characteristics including the presence of significant genome erosion, a non-...

Dynamic structural properties of chromatin play an essential role in defining cell identity and function. Transcription factors and chromatin modifiers establish and maintain cell states through alteration of DNA accessibility and histone modificatio...

Centromeric protein A (CENP-A) is the epigenetic determinant of centromeres. This protein has been shown to be adaptively evolving in a number of animal and plant species. In a previous communication we were able to demonstrate that signs of adaptive...

The phytohormone auxin is one of the most important signaling molecules that undergo accumulation or depletion in a temporal or spatial manner due to wide arrays of changes in developmental or stress programs. Proper distribution, maintenance and hom...

The impact of histone acetylation on transcription was revealed over 50 years ago by Allfrey and colleagues. However, it took decades for an understanding of the fine mechanism by which this posttranslational modification affects chromatin structure...

Rapid progress in the study on the association of histone modifications with chromatin remodeling factors has broadened our understanding of chromatin dynamics in DNA transactions. In DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair, the well-known mark of histo...

The contribution of chromatin dynamics to the regulation of human disease-associated loci such as the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene has been the focus of intensive experimentation for many years. Recent technologica...

Hair color is one of the most visible and heritable traits in humans. Here, we estimated heritability by structural equation modeling (N = 20,142), and performed a genome wide association (GWA) analysis (N = 7091) and a GCTA study (N = 3340) on hair...

Despite numerous studies implicating Alu repeat elements in various diseases, there is sparse information available with respect to the potential functional and biological roles of the repeat elements in Type 1 diabetes (T1D). Therefore, we performed...

Polycomb group (PcG) proteins contribute to the formation and maintenance of a specific repressive chromatin state that prevents the expression of genes in a particular space and time. Polycomb repressive complexes (PRCs) consist of several PcG prot...

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a cancer associated with exposure to asbestos fibers, which accumulate in the pleural space, damage tissue and stimulate regeneration. Hedgehog signaling is a pathway important during embryonic mesothelium deve...

Objective: The manuscript investigates the relation between adiponectin gene (ADIPOQ) polymorphisms and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in a Chinese population. Methods: We designed a case-control study involving 340 normal glucose tolerant (NGT) sub...

It is increasingly recognised that lncRNAs play essential regulatory roles in fundamental biological processes and, consequently, that their dysregulation may contribute to major human diseases, including cancer. Better understanding of lncRNA biolog...

Transcriptional activation of eukaryotic genes is accompanied, in general, by a change in the sensitivity of promoter chromatin to endonucleases. The structural basis of this alteration has remained elusive for decades; but the change has been viewe...

Posttranslational modification of proteins by means of attachment of a small globular protein ubiquitin (i.e., ubiquitylation) represents one of the most abundant and versatile mechanisms of protein regulation employed by eukaryotic cells. Ubiquityla...