Publication details
The epigenetic landscape of the plant Telomerase RNA gene
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | Telomerase solves the shortening of the eukaryotic chromosomes by adding telomeric repeats to their ends using a reverse-transcription mechanism. This ribonucleoprotein enzyme consists of a telomerase RNA (TR) component, which serves as the RNA template, and a catalytic subunit (TERT). In humans, the expression of the TERT gene is closely associated with telomerase activity, which was detected mainly in highly proliferating cells, while TR remains ubiquitously expressed regardless of telomerase activity (reviewed in Schrumpfová et al., 2019). The recent discovery of the genuine TR sequences of land plants (Fajkus et al., 2019) opened up new ways to characterise the regulation of the TR gene transcription. In contrast, plants express the TR subunit in a tissue-specific pattern similar to that of TERT and, in comparison to humans, TR is transcribed by RNA Pol III. Overall, both TERT and TR are expressed in developing organs and tissues, such as seedlings and meristems, but are suppressed in terminally differentiated tissues, like older leaves (reviewed in Schrumpfová and Fajkus, 2020). We gathered publicly available ChIP-seq data of various epigenetic marks and applied an advanced bioinformatic pipeline to show the presence of epigenetic marks associated with open chromatin in the Arabidopsis thaliana TR gene region. |