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Originally published in Science Express on 10 May 2001
Science 15 June 2001:
Vol. 292. no. 5524, pp. 2077 - 2080
DOI: 10.1126/science.1059745
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Reports

Requirement of CHROMOMETHYLASE3 for Maintenance of CpXpG Methylation

Anders M. Lindroth,1* Xiaofeng Cao,1* James P. Jackson,1* Daniel Zilberman,1 Claire M. McCallum,3 Steven Henikoff,23 Steven E. Jacobsen1dagger

Epigenetic silenced alleles of the Arabidopsis SUPERMAN locus (the clark kent alleles) are associated with dense hypermethylation at noncanonical cytosines (CpXpG and asymmetric sites, where X = A, T, C, or G). A genetic screen for suppressors of a hypermethylated clark kent mutant identified nine loss-of-function alleles of CHROMOMETHYLASE3 (CMT3), a novel cytosine methyltransferase homolog. These cmt3 mutants display a wild-type morphology but exhibit decreased CpXpG methylation of the SUP gene and of other sequences throughout the genome. They also show reactivated expression of endogenous retrotransposon sequences. These results show that a non-CpG DNA methyltransferase is responsible for maintaining epigenetic gene silencing.

1 Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
3 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA.
*   These authors contributed equally to this work.

dagger    To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jacobsen{at}ucla.edu

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