Polycistronic coexpression and nondenaturing purification of histone octamers.

Abstract Histone octamers are the basic building blocks of chromatin and are platforms for diverse genetic mechanisms. We report a simple method for preparing recombinant histone octamers by overexpressing all four histones from a single polycistronic vector followed by standard chromatography under native conditions. This approach reduces the time needed for the octamer preparation to a single day and should be applicable to making a variety of unmodified and modified histone octamers.