RESEARCH ARTICLE Cohesin architecture and clustering in vivo Siheng Xiang, Douglas Koshland* Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States Abstract Cohesin helps mediate sister chromatid cohesion, chromosome condensation, DNA repair, and transcription regulation. We exploited proximity-dependent labeling to define the in vivo interactions of cohesin domains with DNA or with other cohesin domains that lie within the same or in different cohesin complexes. Our results suggest that both cohesin’s head and hinge domains are proximal to DNA, and cohesin structure is dynamic with differential folding of its coiled coil regions to generate butterfly confirmations. This method also reveals that cohesins form ordered clusters on and off DNA. The levels of cohesin clusters and their distribution on chromosomes are cell cycle-regulated. Cohesin clustering is likely necessary for cohesion maintenance because clustering and maintenance uniquely require the same subset of cohesin domains and the auxiliary cohesin factor Pds5p. These conclusions provide important new mechanistic and biological insights into the architecture of the cohesin complex, cohesin–cohesin interactions, and cohesin’s tethering and loop-extruding activities. Introduction Chromosome segregation, DNA damage repair, and the regulation of gene expression require the tethering or folding of chromosomes (Uhlmann, 2016; Onn et al., 2008). Remarkably, these differ- ent types of chromosome organizations are all mediated by a conserved family of protein complexes *For correspondence:
[email protected] called structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) (Onn et al., 2008; Nolivos and Sherratt, 2014; Hirano, 2016; Hassler et al., 2018). SMC complexes tether and fold chromosomes by two Competing interests: The activities.