The roles of nucleosome sliding and histone modifications in controlling the fidelity of transcription initiation

Regulation of gene transcription starts from the transcription initiation. Precisely transcription initiation is critical for generating correct transcripts with proper abundance. The impact of epigenetic control, such as histone modifications and chromatin remodeling, on gene regulation has been extensively investigated, but their role in transcription initiation is far from well understood. Here we examined the roles of the histone H3 methylations, and chromatin remodeling complex Ino80C coupled with transcriptional regulatory factors Mot1 and Nc2 (MINC), on the regulation of transcription initiation at a genome-scale using the budding yeast as a study system. We obtained and analyzed maps of transcription start site (TSS) at single-nucleotide resolution for strains with depletion of MINC and loss of histone (H3K4, K36 and K79) methylation.