Don and Ada Olins publish article in ‘Epigenetics’

Don Olins, Ph.D., and Ada Olins, Ph.D., research faculty members in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, recently co-authored an article titled, "Epichromatin is conserved in Toxoplasma gondii and labels the exterior parasite chromatin throughout the cell cycle" in the journal Epigenetics.

In brief, this article describes how Toxoplasma gondii (in the same phylum as Plasmodium, the cause of Malaria) produces human and animal diseases worldwide.  T. gondii can be grown in the laboratory and serves as a good model organism for studying nuclear architecture and function in these parasites, with a goal towards eliminating the diseases.

The present study demonstrates that, in addition to the evolutionary conservation of histones and nucleosomes, these organisms conserve the epichromatin region adjacent to the nuclear envelope, a region proposed to play an essential role in establishing and maintaining nuclear architecture.