A special class of non-histone protein tightly complexed with template-inactive DNA in chromatin.

A special class of non-histone protein ("tight protein") is identified in purified HeLa cell chromatin on the basis of its failure to dissociate from the DNA at very high ionic strength (2.5 M NaCl-5.0 M urea), where over 92% of the total chromatin protein is released. The tight proteins are insoluble in 0.4 N H2SO4 and lack histones as determined by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. They have molecular weights between 14,000 and 85,000 with over 70% of the polypeptide chains between 14,000 and 30,000 mol wt. This is the same size range as the non-histone proteins which others have found to display species-specific DNA binding in vitro. There is approximately one molecule of tight protein per 275 DNA base pairs. The tight proteins are characterized by much higher rates of labeling with amino acids than the histones and non-histone chromatin proteins that are dissociated from the DNA by high ionic strength, but they have the lowest phosphorylation levels. Chromatin fractionation experiments were performed to investigate the distribution of tight proteins between template-active and template-inactive regions. Under specific conditions, spleen DNase (DNase II) selectively shears those portions of HeLa cell chromatin that contain nascent RNA transcripts. This nascent RNA-enriched chromatin fraction also contains a high level of the proteins known to be complexed with heterogeneous nuclear RNA in ribonucleoprotein particles and contains over 70% of the RNA polymerase activity of total chromatin. When this method was employed to investigate the distribution of tight proteins, they were found to be almost entirely confined to the template-inactive fraction. Although these experiments do not elucidate the precise function of these proteins, they identify, for the first time, a particular subclass of non-histone chromosomal protein which is distributed asymmetrically between transcriptionally active and inactive chromatin regions.