Organization of chromatin during spermiogenesis: beaded fibers, partly beaded fibers, and loss of nucleosomal structure

The aggregation of chromatin during spermiogenesis in the house cricket and many other animals is an orderly process involving the formation of a series of long, thick, well defined structures. The differentiation of chromatin preliminary to the development of such unusual structures is given attention here. Examination of nuclei after lysis and spreading indicated that fibers with closely spaced nucleosomes, like the fibers of somatic chromatin, make up the chromatin in all stages of early spermiogenesis and most of middle spermiogenesis. The thick structures of late spermatids cannot be formed by aggregation of fibers of this somatic type, however; just before thick structures form, chromatin fibers lose the nucleosomal structure. During the process, fibers with nucleosomes spaced at irregular intervals and with long stretches of smooth thin fiber are found, as if nucleosomes at one site on a fiber are broken down independently of those at adjacent sites. Since prior studies of cricket proteins have indicated that somatic histones persist during the stages when nucleosome structure disappears, the observations imply that the histones which are organized in nucleosomes during early stages must become incorporated into different kinds of nucleoprotein complexes during succeeding stages of spermiogenesis.