# Nucleosome sliding can influence the spreading of histone modifications Source: [Nucleosome sliding can influence the spreading of histone modifications]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T03:47:04.449Z Authors: Shantanu Kadam, Tripti Bameta, Ranjith Padinhateeri Published: 2021-10-12T11:28:13.000Z ## Abstract Nucleosomes are the fundamental building blocks of chromatin that not only help in the folding of chromatin but also in carrying epigenetic information. It is known that nucleosome sliding is responsible for dynamically organizing chromatin structure and the resulting gene regulation. Since sliding can move two neighboring nucleosomes physically close or away, can it play a role in the spreading of histone modifications? We investigate this by simulating a stochastic model that couples nucleosome dynamics with the kinetics of histone modifications. We show that the sliding of nucleosomes can affect the modification pattern as well as the time it takes to modify a given region of chromatin. Exploring different nucleosome densities and modification kinetic parameters, we show that nucleosome sliding can be important for creating histone modification domains. Our model predicts that nucleosome density coupled with sliding dynamics can create an asymmetric histone modification profile around regulatory regions. We also compute the probability distribution of modified nucleosomes and relaxation kinetics of modifications. Our predictions are comparable with known experimental results. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()