Research Paper Volume 5, Issue 11 pp 813—824

Dietary and genetic effects on age-related loss of gene silencing reveal epigenetic plasticity of chromatin repression during aging

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Figure 5. Age-related loss of gene silencing is associated with loss of repressive heterochromatin marks at the reporter construct.

Enrichment for HP1a (A) and H3K9me2 (B) in the reporter gene construct region, measured by ChIP-qPCR, decreases with age. Open bars represent 10-day old flies; solid bars, 50-day old flies. The location of the five regions of the reporter construct that were examined are depicted by the short horizontal bars over a diagram of the HS-lacZ reporter construct from [27, 28]: “P5” primers are specific for the 5' P-element LTR, “HZ” primers span the junction of the Hsp70 promoter and lacZ gene, “Z” primers are to an internal region of lacZ, “mW” primers are to an internal region of the mini-white gene, and “P3” primers are specific to the 3' LTR of the P-element construct. Enrichment values are the average for three independent biological replicates of ChIP-qPCR, normalized to the average of two different euchromatin control sites. Each data point represents three independent biological replicates of at least 100 flies from three separate cohorts. Error bars represent SD, *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01.