UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Filters

20181

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Zhao, Haiqing

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    UNCOVERING THE BIOPHYSICAL MECHANISMS OF HISTONE COMPLEX ASSEMBLY
    (2018) Zhao, Haiqing; Papoian, Garegin A.; Biophysics (BIPH); Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    At the most basic level, inheritance in living beings occurs by passing the genomic information such as the DNA sequences from the parent generation to the offspring generation. Hence, it is a fundamental goal for every generation to efficiently express the genomic information and safely pass it on to the next generation. In human and other eukaryotic species, this mission is mediated via chromatin, a macromolecule with intricate hierarchical structure. The fundamental unit of chromatin is called a nucleosome, a complex of histone proteins wrapped around with DNA. To carry out diverse biological functions such as transcription and DNA replication, the DNA-protein complex must dynamically transition between more compact, closed states and more accessible, open ones. To fully understand the chromatin structure and dynamics, it is essential to comprehend the basic structural unit of chromatin, nucleosome. In this dissertation, I present my doctoral research in the exploration of the nucleosome dynamics problem, focusing on the assembly process of histone proteins. From histone monomer to dimer, then to tetramer, octamer, and nucleosome, I used different computational modeling theories and techniques, together with different experimental collaborations, to investigate the overall thermodynamics and specific mechanistic details of nucleosome dynamics at different levels. My work has shed light on the fundamental principles governing the histone protein folding and histone complex assembly, in particular, highlighting similarities and differences between the canonical and variant CENP-A histones.