RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Genome-wide analysis of phased nucleosomal arrays reveals the functional characteristic of the nucleosome remodeler ACF JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 093666 DO 10.1101/093666 A1 Dhawal S. Jain A1 Sandro Baldi A1 Angelika Zabel A1 Tobias Straub A1 Peter B. Becker YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/13/093666.abstract AB The nature of chromatin as regular succession of nucleosomes has gained iconic status. The average nucleosome repeat length (NRL) determined by classical means serves as index for bulk chromatin of a given specimen. However, this value is dominated by regular heterochromatin since nucleosomal arrays are often not regular at individual single copy sequences.To obtain a measure for nucleosome regularity in euchromatin we subjected nucleosome profiles of D. melanogaster embryos to autocorrelation and spectral density estimation. These revealed variation in nucleosome regularity and NRL at different types of euchromatin and yielded a comprehensive catalog of regular phased nucleosome arrays (PNA). The absence of the nucleosome sliding factor ACF1 correlated with global loss of regularity and increased NRL in euchromatin and specifically compromised phasing at a novel class of PNA. Our approach is generally applicable to characterize the functional diversification of nucleosome remodelers in euchromatin organization.