Poster abstracts

Poster number 3 submitted by Hui-wen Liu

SUMO1 modification of the chromatin through the cell cycle

Hui-wen Liu (MCDB), Jie Zhang (Biomedical Informatics), George F. Heine (Biomedical Informatics), Mansi Arora (MCDB), Kun Huang (Biomedical Informatics), Jeffrey D. Parvin (Biomedical Informatics)

Abstract:
SUMOylation is a post-translational modification by small ubiquitin modifier (SUMO) covalently attached to a variety of protein targets such as transcription factors. In many cases, SUMO-modification of a transcriptional regulator results in repression of its activity. We combined chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) of SUMO-1 with next generation sequencing in order to map the landscape of SUMO-1 on the genome. We find that SUMO-1 localization is for the most part constant throughout the course of the cell cycle and following DNA damage. However, when we combine gene expression microarray results with the SUMO-1 results we make two surprising observations. We find that SUMO-1 marks the chromatin associated with the transcription start site in the most active genes, suggesting that it may be involved in transcription stimulation, not repression. We also find that SUMO-1 distribution at active promoters changes through the course of the cell cycle. This is work in progress, and future work will focus on the biological validation of these potential target sites and an analysis of how SUMOylation epigenetically regulates the cell cycle process.

Keywords: SUMOylation, Chip-seq, cell cycle