PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alessandro Scacchetti
AU  - Laura Brueckner
AU  - Dhawal Jain
AU  - Tamas Schauer
AU  - Xu Zhang
AU  - Frank Schnorrer
AU  - Bas van Steensel
AU  - Tobias Straub
AU  - Peter B. Becker
TI  - CHRAC/ACF Contribute to the Repressive Ground State of Chromatin
AID  - 10.1101/218768
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 218768
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/13/218768.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/13/218768.full
AB  - The chromatin remodeling complexes CHRAC and ACF combine the ATPase ISWI with the signature subunit ACF1. These enzymes catalyze well-studied nucleosome sliding reactions in vitro, but how their actions affect physiological gene expression is unclear. Here we explored the influence of Drosophila CHRAC/ACF on transcription by complementary gain- and loss-of-function approaches.Targeting ACF1 to multiple reporter genes inserted at many different genomic locations revealed a context-dependent inactivation of poorly transcribed reporters in repressive chromatin. Accordingly, single-embryo transcriptome analysis of a Acf knock-out allele showed that only lowly expressed genes are de-repressed in the absence of ACF1. Finally, the nucleosome arrays in Acf-deficient chromatin show loss of physiological regularity, particularly in transcriptionally inactive domains.Taken together our results highlight that ACF1-containing remodeling factors contribute to the establishment of an inactive ground state of the genome through chromatin organization.