Chromatin compaction at Hox loci: a polycomb tale beyond histone tails.
A new study in this issue of Molecular Cell (Eskeland et al., 2010) implicates Polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1) in compacting Hox gene chromatin in mouse embryonic stem cells and suggests that compaction, rather than histone tail ubiquitylation, confers Hox gene silencing.
Simon
Jeffrey A
JA
Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. simon004@umn.edu