Cited by 458Genomics and Chromatin DynamicsEpigenetics and DNA MethylationAdvanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques

Visualizing DNA folding and RNA in embryos at single-cell resolution

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Mateo, Leslie J., Murphy, Sedona E., Hafner, Antonina, Cinquini, Isaac S., Walker, Carly A., Boettiger, Alistair N.·2019·Nature

Abstract

The establishment of cell types during development requires precise interactions between genes and distal regulatory sequences. We have a limited understanding of how these interactions look in three dimensions, vary across cell types in complex tissue, and relate to transcription. Here we describe optical reconstruction of chromatin architecture (ORCA), a method that can trace the DNA path in single cells with nanoscale accuracy and genomic resolution reaching two kilobases. We used ORCA to study a Hox gene cluster in cryosectioned Drosophila embryos and labelled around 30 RNA species in parallel. We identified cell-type-specific physical borders between active and Polycomb-repressed DNA, and unexpected Polycomb-independent borders. Deletion of Polycomb-independent borders led to ectopic enhancer-promoter contacts, aberrant gene expression, and developmental defects. Together, these results illustrate an approach for high-resolution, single-cell DNA domain analysis in vivo, identify domain structures that change with cell identity, and show that border elements contribute to the formation of physical domains in Drosophila.

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  • The frequency of enhancer-promoter contacts may have non-linear effects on transcriptional output.

    “It also follows from these models that the frequency of enhancer–promoter contacts may have non-linear effects on transcriptional output, consistent with experimental observations [405, 503].”

    From Transcriptional enhancers and their communication with gene promoters (2021) · cites this paper as [503]

    In “Cis contacts predict transcription” (page unavailable), the paper reports that enhancer–promoter proximity weakly predicts whether nascent transcription is present. It does not establish how contact frequency affects the amount of transcription or show a non-linear relationship, so that part of the attributed claim is unsupported. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Advances in super-resolution imaging enable visualisation of multiple interacting loci to the resolution of a few kilobases in single cells.

    “advances in super-resolution imaging (reviewed in [500]) now enable the visualisation of multiple interacting loci to the resolution of a few kilobases in single cells [448, 501–503].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. [59]Ester M, Kriegel H-P, Sander J & Xu X A Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters. KDD-96 Proceedings 226– 231 (1996).

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Authors
Mateo, L. J., Murphy, S. E., Hafner, A., Cinquini, I. S., Walker, C. A., & Boettiger, A. N.
Affiliations
Stanford University (US)
Corresponding author
Boettiger, Alistair N.
Venue
Nature
Published
2019-03-18
Volume
568
Issue
7750
Pages
49-54
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
OpenAlex
W2921773684
Cited by
446
References
62
Citations by year
2026: 43 · 2025: 53 · 2024: 57 · 2023: 61 · 2022: 59 · 2021: 71 · 2020: 68 · 2019: 31 · 2018: 1
FWCI
19.68
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Institutes of Health (1dp2gm132935-01)
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences (DP2 GM132935)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Epigenetics and DNA Methylation
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Biophysics › Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques
Keywords
DNA folding, chromatin structure, polycomb repressive complex, Hox gene clusters, Drosophila embryo, enhancer-promoter interactions, RNA localization, developmental gene regulation, transcriptional repression
MeSH terms
Animals, Chromatin, DNA, Drosophila melanogaster, Enhancer Elements, Genetic, Female, Genes, Homeobox, Multigene Family, Male, Nucleic Acid Conformation, Organ Specificity, Promoter Regions, Genetic, RNA, Transcription, Genetic, Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental, Genome, Insect, Single-Cell Analysis, Polycomb-Group Proteins

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