A Nonessential HP1-Like Protein Affects Starvation-Induced Assembly of Condensed Chromatin and Gene Expression in Macronuclei of Tetrahymena thermophila

Heterochromatin represents a specialized chromatin environment vital to both the repression and expression of certain eukaryotic genes.One of the best-studied heterochromatin-associated proteins is Drosophila HP1.In this report, we have disrupted all somatic copies of the Tetrahymena HHP1 gene, which encodes an HP1-like protein, Hhp1p, in macronuclei (H.