Journal Club Notes on Chromatin Accessibility

Notes from Journal Club

I’m reading an article on

Dynamic interplay between enhancer–promoter topology and gene activity

It is about chromatin accessiblity. It seems to describe a system for measuring the proximity of promoter-enhancer pairs.

So far I have only covered the setup of the system and a few control experiments designed to assess it’s reliability.

I started reading another paper on the advice of my PI:

Ubiquitously transcribed genes use alternative polyadenylation to achieve tissue-specific expression

I’m not too familiar with polyadenylation as a regulatory mechanism.

They claim that more than half of human genes use alternative cleavage and polyadenylation to generate mRNA transcripts that differ in the lengths of their 3’ untranslated regions

Interestingly, they claim that multi-UTR genes mostly change 3’ UTR isoform ratios to achieve tissue specificity.

So, instead of finding global shifts in 3’ UTR length during transformation and differentiation, they identify tissue -specific groups of multi-UTR genes that change their 3’ UTR ratios.