Publications by authors named "Mary R Szurgot"

Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the structure and function of the HIRA/Hir histone chaperone complex in collaboration with ASF1a/Asf1, which are essential for depositing histone tetramers onto DNA for chromatin assembly without replication.
  • - Researchers used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to reveal the architecture of the S. cerevisiae Hir complex, finding that it forms an arc-shaped dimer with a specific arrangement of its subunits, which helps in positioning histones effectively.
  • - The findings indicate that the Hir/Asf1 complex works to enhance histone tetramer formation and their integration into DNA, showcasing a potential mechanism for chromatin assembly.
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Sleep is evolutionarily conserved, thus studying simple invertebrates such as can provide mechanistic insight into sleep with single cell resolution. A conserved pathway regulating sleep across phylogeny involves cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), a ubiquitous second messenger that functions in neurons by activating protein kinase A. sleep in response to cellular stress caused by environmental insults [stress-induced sleep (SIS)], a model for studying sleep during sickness.

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Epigenetic regulation of the chromatin landscape is often orchestrated through modulation of nucleosomes. Nucleosomes are composed of two copies each of the four core histones, H2A, H2B, H3, and H4, wrapped in ~150 bp of DNA. We focus this review on recent structural studies that further elucidate the mechanisms used by macromolecular complexes to mediate histone modification and nucleosome assembly.

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Epigenetics has become a fundamental scientific discipline with various implications for biology and medicine. Epigenetic marks, mostly DNA methylation and histone post-translational modifications (PTMs), play important roles in chromatin structure and function. Accurate quantification of these marks is an ongoing challenge due to the variety of modifications and their wide dynamic range of abundance.

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