ArticleThe EMBO journal2009
Molecular crowding affects diffusion and binding of nuclear proteins in heterochromatin and reveals the fractal organization of chromatin.
Article in The EMBO journal, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 208 papers.
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Who cites it
208 citing papers in PubMed, 443 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mapping Protein Diffusion from the Plasma Membrane to the Nucleus: Insights from Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy.Biomolecules · 2026Review
- Nuclear-specific reductive carboxylation of alpha-ketoglutarate fuels histone acetylation to induce chromatin accessibility and gene activation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Lipids Contribute to Heterochromatin Condensation Revealed by Quantitative Raman-Brillouin Microscopy.JACS Au · 2026Article
- Spatial triple-correlation spectroscopy reveals heterotrimer dynamics in live cells.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- Chromatin unwinding state for in situ identification and lineage tracing of circulating tumor cells.iMeta · 2026Article
- Cytoplasmic crowding acts as a porous medium reducing macromolecule diffusion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Geometrically Encoded Positioning of Introns, Intergenic Segments, and Exons in the Human Genome.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Flips reveal the universal impact of memory on random explorations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Closing the loops: chromatin loop dynamics after DNA damage.Nucleus (Austin, Tex.) · 2025Review
- Osmotic pressure regulates DNA labelling and transcription with dCas9-SunTag system in live cells.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation from the Viewpoint of Molecular Crowding Environment: A Raman Imaging Study.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2025Review
- Binding memory of liquid molecules.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Pair correlation microscopy of intracellular molecular transport.Nature protocols · 2025Review
- Underestimated role of macromolecular crowding in bioengineeredMaterials today. Bio · 2025Article
- Geometrically encoded positioning of introns, intergenic segments, and exons in the human genome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Immunocytochemical detection of proteins within cellular structures inaccessible to specific antibodies.Histochemistry and cell biology · 2025Review
- Predicting gene expression changes from chromatin structure modification.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2025Article
- Nuclear mechano-confinement induces geometry-dependent HP1α condensate alterations.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Rethinking chromatin accessibility: from compaction to dynamic interactions.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2025Review
- Chromatin Topological Domains Associate With the Rapid Formation of Tandem Duplicates in Plants.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
148 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The nucleus of eukaryotes is organized into functional compartments, the two most prominent being heterochromatin and nucleoli. These structures are highly enriched in DNA, proteins or RNA, and thus thought to be crowded. In vitro, molecular crowding induces volume exclusion, hinders diffusion and enhances association, but whether these effects are relevant in vivo remains unclear. Here, we establish that volume exclusion and diffusive hindrance occur in dense nuclear compartments by probing the diffusive behaviour of inert fluorescent tracers in living cells. We also demonstrate that chromatin-interacting proteins remain transiently trapped in heterochromatin due to crowding induced enhanced affinity. The kinetic signatures of these crowding consequences allow us to derive a fractal model of chromatin organization, which explains why the dynamics of soluble nuclear proteins are affected independently of their size. This model further shows that the fractal architecture differs between heterochromatin and euchromatin, and predicts that chromatin proteins use different target-search strategies in the two compartments. We propose that fractal crowding is a fundamental principle of nuclear organization, particularly of heterochromatin maintenance.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.