Volume 27, No 2, Feb 2017

ISSN: 1001-0602 
EISSN: 1748-7838 2018 
impact factor 17.848* 
(Clarivate Analytics, 2019)

Volume 27 Issue 2, February 2017: 226-240   |  Open Access

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

A pair of transposon-derived proteins function in a histone acetyltransferase complex for active DNA demethylation

Cheng-Guo Duan^1,2,*, Xingang Wang^2,*, Shaojun Xie¹, Li Pan³, Daisuke Miki¹, Kai Tang², Chuan-Chih Hsu³, Mingguang Lei¹, Yingli Zhong¹, Yueh-Ju Hou², Zhijuan Wang^2,4, Zhengjing Zhang¹, Satendra K Mangrauthia^2,5, Huawei Xu^2,6, Heng Zhang¹, Brian Dilkes³, W Andy Tao³ and Jian-Kang Zhu^1,2

¹Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology, Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
²Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
³Department of Biochemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
⁴The State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering, Center for Agricultural Research Resources, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shijiazhuang, Hebei 050022, China
⁵Biotechnology Section, Indian Institute of Rice Research (IIRR), Hyderabad, India
⁶College of Agriculture, Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, Henan 471026, China Correspondence: Jian-Kang Zhu, E-mail: jkzhu@purdue.edu

Transposons are generally kept silent by epigenetic mechanisms including DNA methylation. Here, we identified a pair of Harbinger transposon-derived proteins (HDPs), HDP1 and HDP2, as anti-silencing factors in Arabidopsis. hdp1 and hdp2 mutants displayed an enhanced silencing of transgenes and some transposons. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that HDP1 and HDP2 were co-domesticated from the Harbinger transposon-encoded transposase and DNA-binding protein, respectively. HDP1 interacts with HDP2 in the nucleus, analogous to their transposon counterparts. Moreover, HDP1 and HDP2 are associated with IDM1, IDM2, IDM3 and MBD7 that constitute a histone acetyltransferase complex functioning in DNA demethylation. HDP2 and the methyl-DNA-binding protein MBD7 share a large set of common genomic binding sites, indicating that they jointly determine the target specificity of the histone acetyltransferase complex. Thus, our data revealed that HDP1 and HDP2 constitute a functional module that has been recruited to a histone acetyltransferase complex to prevent DNA hypermethylation and epigenetic silencing.

10.1038/cr.2016.147

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