SINEs IN MAMMALIAN GENOMES CAN SERVE AS ADDITIONAL SIGNALS IN FORMATION OF FACULTATIVE HETEROCHROMATIN
N. M. Usmanova, V. I. Kazakov, N. V. Tomilin
Institute Cytology RAS, St. Petersburg;
e-mail: nmusmanova@gmail.com
Using computer-based methods we determined the global distribution of short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs) in the human and mouse
X chromosomes. It has been shown that this distributions is similar to the distributions of CpG islands and genes but is different from the distribution of
LINE1 elements. Since SINEs (human Alu and mouse B2) may have binding sites for Polycomb protein YY1, we suggest that these repeats
can serve as additional signals ("boosters") in Polycomb-dependent silencing of gene rich segments during X inacti-vation.
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