History
Histones were discovered in 1884 by Albrecht Kossel. The word "histone" dates from the late 19th century and is from the German "Histon", of uncertain origin: perhaps from Greek histanai or from histos. Until the early 1990s, histones were dismissed by most as inert packing material for eukaryotic nuclear DNA, based in part on the "ball and stick" models of Mark Ptashne and others who believed that transcription was activated by protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions on largely naked DNA templates, as is the case in bacteria. During the 1980s, work by Michael Grunstein demonstrated that eukaryotic histones repress gene transcription, and that the function of transcriptional activators is to overcome this repression. It is now known that histones play both positive and negative roles in gene expression, forming the basis of the histone code.
The discovery of the H5 histone appears to date back to 1970s, and in classification it has been grouped with H1.
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