Bühler M Mohn F Stalder L Mühlemann O 2005 Cells possess mechanisms to prevent synthesis of potentially deleterious truncated proteins caused by premature translation-termination codons (PTCs). Here, we show that PTCs can induce silencing of transcription of its cognate gene. We demonstrate for immunoglobulin (Ig)-mu minigenes expressed in HeLa cells that this transcriptional silencing is PTC specific and reversible by treatment of the cells with histone deacetylase inhibitors. Furthermore, PTC-containing Ig-mu minigenes are significantly more associated with K9-methylated histone H3 and less associated with acetylated H3 than the PTC-free Ig-mu minigene. This nonsense-mediated transcriptional gene silencing (NMTGS) is also observed with an Ig-gamma minigene, but not with several classic NMD reporter genes, suggesting that NMTGS might be specific for Ig genes. NMTGS represents a nonsense surveillance mechanism by which truncation of a gene's open reading frame (ORF) induces transcriptional silencing through chromatin remodeling. Remarkably, NMTGS is inhibited by overexpression of the putative siRNase 3'hExo, suggesting that siRNA-like molecules are involved in NMTGS. https://sonar.ch/global/documents/192227 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1016/j.molcel.2005.03.030 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/15866173 Molecular cell. - 2005 Base Sequence Codon, Nonsense Exonucleases Gene Silencing Genes, Immunoglobulin Genes, Reporter HeLa Cells Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors Histone Deacetylases Histones Humans Immunoglobulins Lysine Methylation RNA Interference Sequence Alignment Transcription, Genetic Transcriptional silencing of nonsense codon-containing immunoglobulin minigenes. http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501