A significant accumulation of H3K4me2 is observed at genes that are up-regulated in a swm1 deletion strain. In vivo, loss of Swm1 increases the global levels of both H3K9me2 and H3K4me2. In vitro, we show that bacterially expressed Swm1 also possesses lysine 9 demethylase activity. The data presented here demonstrate that in fission yeast the SWIRM/PAO domain proteins Swm1 and Swm2 are associated in complexes that can remove methyl groups from lysine 9 methylated histone H3. Using hyper-geometric probability comparisons we uncover genetic links between lysine-specific demethylases, the histone deacetylase Clr6, and the chromatin remodeller Hrp1.

Using chromatin-immunoprecipitation, to isolate fragments of chromatin containing either H3K4me2 or H3K9me2, and DNA microarray analysis (ChIP-chip), we have studied genome-wide changes in patterns of histone methylation, and their correlation with gene expression, upon deletion of the swm1 + gene. However, we find that this complex specifically demethylates lysine 9 in histone H3 (H3K9) and both up- and down-regulates expression of different groups of genes. pombe proteins, which we name Swm1 and Swm2 (after SWIRM1 and SWIRM2), associate together in a complex. Consistent with previous work we find that the two S. In order to gain a more global view of the activity of histone demethylases, we report here genome-wide studies of the fission yeast SWIRM and polyamine oxidase (PAO) domain homologues of mammalian LSD1.

Fission vs fusion venn diagram