Nucleosome Positioning

A paper with the title Intrinsic histone-DNA interactions are not the major determinant of nucleosome positions in vivo was published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology [16, 847 - 852 (2009)]. It's authors are Yong Zhang, Zarmik Moqtaderi, Barbara P Rattner, Ghia Euskirchen, Michael Snyder, James T Kadonaga, X Shirley Liu and Kevin Struhl.

The authors explained that they analyzed histone-DNA interactions and in so doing mapped nucleosomes assembled on DNA. For other sites about nucleosomes try this link, this one, this one or this one. The authors stated the following (quoting):

Our results argue against a genomic code for nucleosome positioning, and they suggest that the nucleosomal pattern in coding regions arises primarily from statistical positioning from a barrier near the promoter that involves some aspect of transcriptional initiation by RNA polymerase II.

This paper (in contrast to at least one other) cited an absence of data suggesting that there was coding of nucleosome positioning. It did indicate that yeast DNA was strongly preferred by nucleosomes compared to Escherichia coli DNA. Yeast is a eukaryotic organism and E coli a prokaryote.