Chromosome conformation capture in primary human cells

Abstract

3D organization of the genome, its structural and regulatory function of cell identity, is acquiring prominent features in epigenetics studies; more efforts have been done to develop techniques that allow studying nuclear structure. Chromosome conformation capture (3C) has been set up in 2002 from Dekker and from that moment great investments were made to develop genomics variants of 3C technology (4C, 5C, Hi-C) providing new tools to investigate the shape of the genome in a more systematic and unbiased manner. 3C method allows scientists to fix dynamic and variable 3D interactions in nuclear space, and consequently to study which sequences interact, how a gene is regulated by different and distant enhancer, or how a set of enhancer could regulate transcriptional units; to follow the conformation that mediates regulation change in development; and to evaluate if this fine epigenetic mechanism is impaired in disease condition.