Structure and mechanism of plant histone mark readers

In eukaryotes, epigenetic-based mechanisms are involved in almost all the important biological processes. Amongst different epigenetic regulation pathways, the dynamic covalent modifications on histones are the most extensively investigated and characterized types. The covalent modifications on histone can be "read" by specific protein domains and then subsequently trigger downstream signaling events. Plants generally possess epigenetic regulation systems similar to animals and fungi, but also exhibit some plant-specific features. Similar to animals and fungi, plants require distinct protein domains to specifically"read" modified histones in both modification-specific and sequence-specific manners. In this review, we will focus on recent progress of the structural studies on the recognition of the epigenetic marks on histones by plant reader proteins, and further summarize the general and exceptional features of plant histone mark readers.

Computational Identification of Active Enhancers in Model Organisms

As a class of cis-regulatory elements, enhancers were first identified as the genomic regions that are able to markedly increase the transcription of genes nearly 30 years ago. Enhancers can regulate gene expression in a cell-type specific and developmental stage specific manner. Although experimental technologies have been developed to identify enhancers genome-wide, the design principle of the regulatory elements and the way they rewire the transcriptional regulatory network tempo-spatially are far from clear. At present, developing predictive methods for enhanc- ers, particularly for the cell-type specific activity of enhancers, is central to computational biology. In this review, we survey the current computational approaches for active enhancer prediction and discuss future directions.