The demonstration that the bulk of eukaryotic chromatin is organized in a repeating subunit structure, the nucleosome (for references, see Kornberg 1977), raised the question as to whether all genes are packaged in a similar manner, since any model of chromatin structure should also account for the selective transcription of only a minor part of the genome. Studies based on micrococcal nuclease digestion of chromatin have suggested that actively transcribed ribosomal RNA genes (rRNA genes) are indeed in the bulk nucleosome structure (Reeves 1976; Reeves and Jones 1976; Mathis and Gorovsky 1976; Piper et al. 1976). However, in most of these studies the interpretation of the results is complicated by the fact that not all of the rRNA genes are necessarily active at a given time. The examination of specific structural gene sequences coding for mRNA provides a sharper focus on the question, although in this case, also, the possible...
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Bellard et al. (1978) studied this question.