The Role of Histones in Gene Expression

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Most people would think that histones are absent from bacteria. About 98% or so of bacteria don't have histones. But it turns out that if you systematically look through a collection of bacteria genomes, you find sequences in those genomes that comparatively look like a histone. So the histones are not only an efficient packing matrix for the DNA but they offer some measure of control that we didn't otherwise have.

Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, into a tiny central nucleus. A key role is played by histones, proteins that provide scaffolding for DNA to wrap around. Histones also appear in archaea (one of the other domains of life), but until recently there wasn't evidence for them in bacteria (the final of the three domains). Todays guest, Tobias Warnecke, is an author on a recent paper that claims to provide such evidence. We discuss this new result, as well as background questions of how cells evolved and what their current structure can teach us about their histories.

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Tobias Warnecke received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Bath. He is currently a Programme Leader and MRC Investigator at the London Institute of Medical Sciences. He is a co-author on A. Hochner et al. (2023), "Histone-Organized Chromatin in Bacteria."

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