Chromatin conformation: A systematic analysis of helical parameters from hydrodynamic data

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Abstract
Chromatin has a “bead‐and‐bridge” appearance when viewed by electron microscopy. We have used quasielastic light scattering and sedimentation velocity techniques to study the hydrodynamic properties of chicken erythrocyte chromatin multimers in an attempt to determine the superstructure in solution. The functional dependence of the friction factor on the number of core particles in the multimer was analyzed by the Garcia de la Torre‐Bloomfield formalism for a rigid array of odd‐sized beads. The hydrodynamic parameters of the monomeric and dimeric subunit components, i.e., bead size and separation, form the basis of a systematic determination of the superstructure. These calculations support a helical conformation for chromatin multimers containing up to twenty repeat units. It is also shown that an “equivalent” helix can be obtained if the bead separation distance is not constrained to that determined for the dimer.