Identification and characterisation of a novel Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 associated protein that is an alternatively spliced product of the LCOR gene locus

Abstract

Polycombs are evolutionary conserved epigenetic regulators crucial for specification of cell types during development. They assemble in multiprotein complexes to modify amino terminal tails of histone H3 at lysine 27 to regulate the expression of underlying genes. PRC2 mediates repression by catalysing trimethylation of histone H3 at lysine 27 (H3K27me) at the promoters of master transcriptional regulators, such as HOX and cell cycle and proliferation regulating genes. Recently, it emerged that PRC2 also mediates the mono-and dimethylation of H3K27 and that these histone marks are associated with gene activation and enhancer silencing, respectively.