{"doi":"10.1073/pnas.1914313117","title":"Role of a DEF/Y motif in histone H2A-H2B recognition and nucleosome editing","abstract":"The SWR complex edits the histone composition of nucleosomes at promoters to facilitate transcription by replacing the two nucleosomal H2A-H2B (A-B) dimers with H2A.Z-H2B (Z-B) dimers. Swc5, a subunit of SWR, binds to A-B dimers, but its role in the histone replacement reaction was unclear. In this study, we showed that Swc5 uses a tandem DEF/Y motif within an intrinsically disordered region to engage the A-B dimer. A 2.37-Å X-ray crystal structure of the histone binding domain of Swc5 in complex with an A-B dimer showed that consecutive acidic residues and flanking hydrophobic residues of Swc5 form a cap over the histones, excluding histone–DNA interaction. Mutations in Swc5 DEF/Y inhibited the nucleosome editing function of SWR in vitro. Swc5 DEF/Y interacts with histones in vivo, and the extent of this interaction is dependent on the remodeling ATPase of SWR, supporting a model in which Swc5 acts as a wedge to promote A-B dimer eviction. Given that DEF/Y motifs are found in other evolutionary unrelated chromatin regulators, this work provides the molecular basis for a general strategy used repeatedly during eukaryotic evolution to mobilize histones in various genomic functions.","journal":"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences","year":2020,"id":98905,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":31,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9622,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":487256,"name":"Lu Sun","orcid":"0000-0003-2991-2065","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":487797,"name":"Leonidas Pierrakeas","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":487798,"name":"Linchang Dai","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":487257,"name":"Lü Pan","orcid":"0000-0001-8862-1765","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":294291,"name":"Ed Luk","orcid":"0000-0002-6619-2258","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":487258,"name":"Zheng Zhou","orcid":"0000-0002-1423-7231","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":487255,"name":"Yan Huang","orcid":"0000-0002-4683-3484","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":38,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:36:58.511143Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}