Species and Organ Specificity in Very Lysine-rich Histones

Abstract

Very lysine-rich histones were extracted by aqueous trichloracetic acid from calf thymus, from the thymus, mammary gland, and liver of rabbits, and from chicken livers. The elution profiles of these histones, obtained by chromatography on Amberlite IRC-50 with a shallow guanidinium chloride gradient, revealed that the very lysine-rich histone complement varied from one animal species to another when a single kind of organ was considered, and even varied among different organs of a single species. The chromatographic resolution of the subfractions of very lysine-rich histones, their amino acid compositions, and their relative mobilities on polyacrylamide gels suggest that the whole very lysine-rich complement of any species consists of a moderately large number of molecular types.