Abstract
Cellular adaptation to environmental stress relies on a wide range of tightly controlled regulatory mechanisms, including transcription. Changes in chromatin structure and organization accompany the transcriptional response to stress, and in some cases, can impart memory of stress exposure to subsequent generations through mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance. In the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, histone post-translational modifications, and in particular histone methylation, have been shown to confer transcriptional memory of exposure to environmental stress conditions through mitotic divisions. Recent evidence from Caenorhabditis elegans also implicates histone methylation in transgenerational inheritance of stress responses, suggesting a more widely conserved role in epigenetic memory.
Highlights
We review recent studies showing how histone methylation contributes to the mitotic inheritance of transcriptional changes induced by stress in S. cerevisiae, and specific cases where exposure to high temperature, chemicals, and starvation have been associated with changes in histone methylation in C. elegans, a model system widely used for transgenerational studies
Repressive chromatin is generally enriched in H3K9 and H3K27 trimethylation (H3K9me3 and H3K27me3), while H3K4me3 is enriched at promoter regions and associated with more accessible chromatin [1]
When memory is induced, INO1 remains at the nuclear periphery, nucleosomes are deacetylated, and a remodeled version of Set1/COMPASS leads to the accumulation of H3K4me2, which is maintained through its interaction with the SET3C histone deacetylase complex
Summary
We review recent studies showing how histone methylation contributes to the mitotic inheritance of transcriptional changes induced by stress in S. cerevisiae, and specific cases where exposure to high temperature, chemicals, and starvation have been associated with changes in histone methylation in C. elegans, a model system widely used for transgenerational studies. The examples described in C. elegans suggest that histone modifications may play a role in transgenerational inheritance of environmental exposure, most of the observed effects extend across a few generations at most, and the underlying mechanisms remain to be described. 2. Histone Methylation and Transcriptional Memory of Stress Induced Gene Activation in Yeast. Histone Methylation and Transcriptional Memory of Stress Induced Gene Activation in Yeast Unicellular organisms such as yeast survive environmental stress by responding rapidly to changes in temperature, nutrients, and osmotic pressure, among others. We focus on examples of epigenetic transcriptional memory implicating chromatin modifications, alternative mechanisms have been reported [4]
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