If you are new to studying epigenomics, you are gonna see many labs that are studying PRC2 actively!
Why people are interested in PRC2 and what is that?
We are gonna talk about it today.
As you can see the name of PRC2 which is polycomb repressive complex2, PRC2 is a repressor.
It consists of proteins.
In animals and humans, they are SUZ12, EED, EZH1/2...
In plants, compositions of the PRC2 complexes are FIE, MSI1, CLF/SWIN and EMF2/VRN2. PRC2 complexes can be different according to the development stages in plants.
So PRC2 should repress transcription by binding with something.
How?
1) PRC2 induces H3K27me3 which is an epigenetic mark that compaction of chromatin and silencing of gene expression.
2) PRC2 binds to polycomb response elements(PRE).
PREs can be some of the transcription factors.
So we can investigate their activity by performing Chip-Seq. Chip-seq is a sequencing technique to detect the abundance of a transcription factor or histone modificaition marker in the whole-genome level. Chip-seq targeting one of the components of PRC2 or H3K27me3 can reveal how they work. Those are background information before reading PRC2 paper!