Topoisomer heterogeneity of plasmid chromatin in living cells.

Previous investigations of topoisomer distributions of simian virus 40 (SV40) DNA from monkey cells have revealed that these circular mini-chromosomes, like relaxed, naked, closed circular DNA, exist as a Gaussian distribution of topoisomers. I have extended this comparison by measuring topoisomer distributions for a variety of plasmid episomes that are stably propagated in cells of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The breadth of the topoisomer distributions for plasmid chromatin, including SV40, is approximately constant when normalized for DNA length, as is the breadth of distribution for naked DNA. However, the distributions for plasmid chromatin are substantially broader than those for the corresponding relaxed, naked DNAs. The breath is constant for plasmids differing in transcriptional activity, and varies only slightly between synchronized and unsynchronized populations of yeast cells, suggesting that variation in plasmid linking number with transcription or replication does not account for the observed heterogeneity in linking number. Topoisomer heterogeneity for plasmid chromatin in vivo may be due to heterogeneity in the number of nucleosomes on each plasmid, which could reflect either the nature of the assembly process or the dynamics of nucleosomes within the cell.