Transcriptional regulation

ChIA-PET

Transcription factor

Biology

Gene

Enhancer

Philosophy

Genome

Chromatin remodeling

Transcription (linguistics)

Genomic organization

Linguistics

DNA sequencing

Computational biology

Genetics

Chromatin

Chromosome conformation capture

Nature Reviews Genetics

In animals, the sequences for controlling gene expression do not concentrate just at the transcription start site of genes, but are frequently thousands to millions of base pairs distal to it. The interaction of these sequences with one another and their transcription start sites is regulated by factors that shape the three-dimensional (3D) organization of the genome within the nucleus. Over the past decade, indirect tools exploiting high-throughput DNA sequencing have helped to map this 3D organization, have identified multiple key regulators of its structure and, in the process, have substantially reshaped our view of how 3D genome architecture regulates transcription. Now, new tools for high-throughput super-resolution imaging of chromatin have directly visualized the 3D chromatin organization, settling some debates left unresolved by earlier indirect methods, challenging some earlier models of regulatory specificity and creating hypotheses about the role of chromatin structure in transcriptional regulation. This Review discusses how chromosome tracing has deepened our understanding of the role of 3D chromatin topology in transcriptional regulation by helping to resolve open questions and opposing models rising from data generated by sequencing-based approaches, such as 3C and HiC.

The spatial organization of transcriptional control