Molecular Cell Article Arginine Methylation Facilitates the Recruitment of TOP3B to Chromatin to Prevent R Loop Accumulation Yanzhong Yang,1 Kevin M. McBride,1 Sean Hensley,1 Yue Lu,1 Frederic Chedin,2 and Mark T. Bedford1,* 1The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, P.O. Box 389, Smithville, TX 78957, USA 2Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology, The University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA *Correspondence:
[email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2014.01.011 SUMMARY nine methyltransferase 1), which deposit the H4R3me2a and H3R17me2a marks, respectively (Yang and Bedford, 2013). Tudor domain-containing protein 3 (TDRD3) is a Both of these marks are recognized by the Tudor domain of major methylarginine effector molecule that reads TDRD3 (Yang et al., 2010), a protein that is enriched at the pro- methyl-histone marks and facilitates gene transcrip- moters of highly transcribed genes and can likely also associate tion. However, the underlying mechanism by which with the C-terminal domain (CTD) of RNA Polymerase II (RNAP II) TDRD3 functions as a transcriptional coactivator is (Sims et al., 2011). TDRD3 has no enzymatic activity of its unknown. We identified topoisomerase IIIB (TOP3B) own, but here we show that it is tightly complexed with DNA topoisomerase IIIb (TOP3B), an interaction that bestows, in as a component of the TDRD3 complex. TDRD3 part, coactivator activity on TDRD3. TOP3B is a member of serves as a molecular bridge between TOP3B and the 1A subfamily of DNA topoisomerases and, as such, targets arginine-methylated histones. The TDRD3-TOP3B underwound or negatively supercoiled DNA (Wang, 2002).