

Figure 2: Electron micrograph of chromatin: the beads on a string In this micrograph, nucleosomes are indicated by arrows. © 2003 Olins, D. E. & Olins, A. L. Chromatin history: our view from the bridge. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 4, 811 (2003). All rights reserved.

The basic repeating structural (and functional) unit of chromatin is the nucleosome, which contains eight histone proteins and about 146 base pairs of DNA (Van Holde, 1988; Wolffe, 1999). The observation by electron microscopists that chromatin appeared similar to beads on a string provided an early clue that nucleosomes exist (Olins and Olins, 1974; Woodcock et al., 1976). Another clue came from chemically cross-linking (i.e., joining) histones in chromatin (Thomas & Kornberg, 1975). This experiment demonstrated that H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 form a discrete protein octamer, which is fully consistent with the presence of a repeating histone-containing unit in the chromatin fiber.

Today, researchers know that nucleosomes are structured as follows: Two each of the histones H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 come together to form a histone octamer, which binds and wraps approximately 1.7 turns of DNA, or about 146 base pairs. The addition of one H1 protein wraps another 20 base pairs, resulting in two full turns around the octamer, and forming a structure called a chromatosome (Box 4 in Figure 1). The resulting 166 base pairs is not very long, considering that each chromosome contains over 100 million base pairs of DNA on average. Therefore, every chromosome contains hundreds of thousands of nucleosomes, and these nucleosomes are joined by the DNA that runs between them (an average of about 20 base pairs). This joining DNA is referred to as linker DNA. Each chromosome is thus a long chain of nucleosomes, which gives the appearance of a string of beads when viewed using an electron microscope (Figure 2; Olins & Olins, 1974, 2003).

The amount of DNA per nucleosome was determined by treating chromatin with an enzyme that cuts DNA (such enzymes are called DNases). One such enzyme, micrococcal nuclease (MNase), has the important property of preferentially cutting the linker DNA between nucleosomes well before it cuts the DNA that is wrapped around octamers. By regulating the amount of cutting that occurs after application of MNase, it is possible to stop the reaction before every linker DNA has been cleaved. At this point, the treated chromatin will consist of mononucleosomes, dinucleosomes (connected by linker DNA), trinucleosomes, and so forth (Hewish and Burgoyne, 1973).If DNA from MNase-treated chromatin is then separated on a gel, a number of bands will appear, each having a length that is a multiple of mononucleosomal DNA (Noll, 1974). The simplest explanation for this observation is that chromatin possesses a fundamental repeating structure. When this was considered together with data from electron microscopy and chemical cross-linking of histones, the "subunit theory" of chromatin (Kornberg, 1974; Van Holde et al., 1974) was adopted. The subunits were later named nucleosomes (Oudet et al., 1975) and were eventually crystallized (Luger et al., 1997). The model of the nucleosome that crystallographers constructed from their data is shown in Figure 3. Phosphodiester backbones of the DNA double helix are shown in brown and turquoise, while histone proteins are shown in blue (H3), green (H4), yellow (H2A), and red (H2B). Note that only eukaryotes (i.e., organisms with a nucleus and nuclear envelope) have nucleosomes. Prokaryotes, such as bacteria, do not.