Developing bioimaging and quantitative methods to study 3D genome

Abstract

The recent advances in chromosome configuration capture (3C)-based series molecular methods and optical superresolution (SR) techniques offer powerful tools to investigate three dimensional (3D) genomic structure in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell nucleus. In this review, we focus on the progress during the last decade in this exciting field. Here we at first introduce briefly genome organization at chromosome, domain and sub-domain level, respectively; then we provide a short introduction to various super-resolution microscopy techniques which can be employed to detect genome 3D structure. We also reviewed the progress of quantitative and visualization tools to evaluate and visualize chromatin interactions in 3D genome derived from Hi-C data. We end up with the discussion that imaging methods and 3C-based molecular methods are not mutually exclusive — actually they are complemental to each other and can be combined together to study 3D genome organization.