Chromatin compaction leads to a preference for peripheral heterochromatin

Abstract

A layer of dense heterochromatin is found at the periphery of the nucleus. Because this peripheral heterochromatin functions as a repressive phase, mechanisms that relocate genes to the periphery play an important role in regulating transcription. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that an interaction that attracts euchromatin and heterochromatin equally to the nuclear envelope will still preferentially locate heterochromatin to the nuclear periphery. This observation considerably broadens the class of possible interactions that result in peripheral positioning to include boundary interactions that either weakly attract all chromatin or strongly bind to a randomly chosen 0.05% of nucleosomes. The key distinguishing feature of heterochromatin is its high chromatin density with respect to euchromatin. In our model, this densification is caused by heterochromatin protein 1’s preferential binding to histone H3 tails with a methylated lysine at the ninth residue, a hallmark of heterochromatin. We find that a global rearrangement of chromatin to place heterochromatin at the nuclear periphery can be accomplished by attaching a small subset of loci, even if these loci are uncorrelated with heterochromatin. Hence, factors that densify chromatin determine which genomic regions condense to form peripheral heterochromatin.