Figure 2.

(a) A regular chromatin fiber without any depletion effects. (b) Disturbed chromatin fibers with linker histone depletion (orange nucleosomes) and nucleosome depletion. One can see that the disturbed chromatin fiber is much more irregular. The regular fiber has a persistence length of ∼280 nm, whereas the disturbed fiber is much more flexible, with a persistence length of only ∼140 nm. If reasonable histone skip rates are taken into account, the regular 30 nm chromatin fiber is replaced by a very irregular structure with a much higher loop frequency.