Abstract

During mitosis, transcription is shut off, chromatin condenses, and most transcription factors (TFs) are reported to be excluded from chromosomes. How do daughter cells re-establish the original transcription program? Recent discoveries that a select set of TFs remain bound on mitotic chromosomes suggest a potential mechanism for maintaining transcriptional programs through the cell cycle termed mitotic bookmarking. Here we report instead that many TFs remain associated with chromosomes in mouse embryonic stem cells, and that the exclusion previously described is largely a fixation artifact. In particular, most TFs we tested are significantly enriched on mitotic chromosomes. Studies with Sox2 reveal that this mitotic interaction is more dynamic than in interphase and is facilitated by both DNA binding and nuclear import. Furthermore, this dynamic mode results from lack of transcriptional activation rather than decreased accessibility of underlying DNA sequences in mitosis. The nature of the cross-linking artifact prompts careful re-examination of the role of TFs in mitotic bookmarking.

Data availability

The following data sets were generated
    1. Sheila Teves
    (2016) Global accessibility of mitotic chromosomes
    Publicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE85184).
The following previously published data sets were used

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Sheila S Teves

    Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1220-2414
  2. Luye An

    Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  3. Anders S Hansen

    Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  4. Liangqi Xie

    Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  5. Xavier Darzacq

    Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  6. Robert Tjian

    Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States
    For correspondence
    jmlim@berkeley.edu
    Competing interests
    Robert Tjian, President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2009-present), one of the three founding funders of eLife, and a member of eLife's Board of Directors.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0539-8217

Funding

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  • Robert Tjian

Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research

  • Sheila S Teves

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

© 2016, Teves et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Sheila S Teves
  2. Luye An
  3. Anders S Hansen
  4. Liangqi Xie
  5. Xavier Darzacq
  6. Robert Tjian
(2016)
A dynamic mode of mitotic bookmarking by transcription factors
eLife 5:e22280.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22280

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https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22280