Edited by: Eugene Russo
J. Taunton, C.A. Hassig, S.L. Schreiber, "A mammalian histone deacetylase related to the yeast transcriptional regulator Rpd3p," Science, 272:408-11, 1996. (Cited in more than 195 papers since publication)
Comments by Stuart L. Schreiber, professor of chemistry at Harvard University
Stuart Schreiber Vincent G. Allfrey, now a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, first detected histone deacetylase, or HDAC, activity in nuclear extracts 34 years ago; soon after, he and other investigators showed a correlation between the acetylation state of chromatin and the rate of transcription.1 But the molecular characterization of the protein or proteins involved in deacetylation eluded identification, purification, and cloning until this paper's authors, from Harvard University, accidentally stumbled upon the sought-after enzymes in 1996. Adding to the novelty, when they checked the cloned gene's sequence against the gene bank database, they got a match with the yeast gene Rpd3p, a known transcriptional regulator. ...
