Samuel Le Goff

Abstract The transition from seed to seedling involves major changes in nuclear organization and gene expression, yet the extent to which this developmental transition requires chromatin reprogramming remains largely unexplored. Here, we report that Arabidopsis dry seed embryos accumulate the histone variant H2B.8, which contributes to higher-order chromatin organization by forming spatial clusters that structure the 3D nuclear space.

Abstract TELOMERE REPEAT BINDING proteins (TRBs) are plant-specific transcriptional regulators that combine two DNA-binding domains, the GH1 domain shared with H1 histones that binds to linker DNA and the Myb/SANT domain that specifically recognizes the telobox DNA binding site motif. TRB1, TRB2 and TRB3 proteins recruit the Polycomb group complex 2 (PRC2) to deposit H3K27me3 and JMJ14 to remove H3K4me3 at target genes containing telobox motifs in their promoters to repress transcription.