Review: Chromatin organization in plant and animal stem cell maintenance

Abstract Stem cells have self-renewal capacity and can differentiate into specialized cell types. Although the origin, form and differentiated destinations of stem cells differ between animals and plants, they are regulated by similar epigenetic mechanisms during differentiation. There is increasing evidence that the three-dimensional (3D) genome organization plays important roles in gene expression regulation during stem cell differentiation. In plant cells, however, studies related to chromatin interaction in gene expression regulation are just beginning and will be a hot topic in the future. In this review, we summarized the similarities of plant and animal stem cell niches and their function in stem cell maintenance, the roles of chromatin conformation changes in regulating gene expression and recent findings about chromatin organization in plant cells at genome-wide and loci-specific levels.