IC4R006-Epigenomic-2016-22110044

Project Title

The identification and functional characterization of the regula- tory DNA elements is essential for understanding the regulation of gene expression in eukaryotic genomes. Although the genomes of an increasing number of eukaryotic species have been sequenced, genome-wide identification of regulatory DNA elements, such as that being done in the ENCODE project (The ENCODE Project Consortium 2007) and the Epigenomics Roadmap (Bernstein et al. 2010) in humans and in the modENCODE projects in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster (Gerstein et al. 2010; Roy et al. 2010), has been initiated only in few species. Active regulatory DNA elements, such as promoter and enhancers, in- teract with regulatory proteins. As a result, these regions are either free of nucleosomes or are under dynamic nucleosome modifications or displacements (Henikoff et al. 2009; Jin et al. 2009). Thus, active DNA elements are associated with open chromatin in higher eukaryotic genomes. One distinct characteristic of the genomic regions of open chromatin is a pronounced sensitivity to cleavage of endonuclease DNase I (Wu 1980; Keene et al. 1981; McGhee et al. 1981). Almost all active regulatory elements, in- cluding promoters, enhancers, suppressors, insulators, and locus control regions, have been shown to be marked by DNase I hypersensitive (DH) sites. (Gross and Garrard 1988).

Department of Horticulture, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA;
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California–Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA;
Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA