Convergence of topological domain boundaries, insulators, and polytene interbands revealed by high-resolution mapping of chromatin contacts in the early Drosophila melanogaster embryo
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
Abstract
High-throughput assays of three-dimensional interactions of chromosomes have shed considerable light on the structure of animal chromatin. Despite this progress, the precise physical nature of observed structures and the forces that govern their establishment remain poorly understood. Here we present high resolution Hi-C data from early Drosophila embryos. We demonstrate that boundaries between topological domains of various sizes map to DNA elements that resemble classical insulator elements: short genomic regions sensitive to DNase digestion that are strongly bound by known insulator proteins and are frequently located between divergent promoters. Further, we show a striking correspondence between these elements and the locations of mapped polytene interband regions. We believe it is likely this relationship between insulators, topological boundaries, and polytene interbands extends across the genome, and we therefore propose a model in which decompaction of boundary-insulator-interband regions drives the organization of interphase chromosomes by creating stable physical separation between adjacent domains.
Data availability
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Michael Eisen
American Cancer Society
- Michael R Stadler
National Science Foundation
- Jenna E Haines
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Stadler et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 5,494
- views
-
- 816
- downloads
-
- 85
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 85
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29550
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Convergence of topological domain boundaries, insulators, and polytene interbands revealed by high-resolution mapping of chromatin contacts in the early Drosophila melanogaster embryo
eLife 6:e29550.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29550
