A Comprehensive Map of Insulator Elements for the Drosophila Genome

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000814
• Publication Date: 2010-01-14T23:12:13Z
• Authors: Nicolas Nègre; Christopher D. Brown; Parantu K. Shah; Pouya Kheradpour; Carolyn A. Morrison; Jorja G. Henikoff; Xin Feng; Kami Ahmad; Steven Russell; Robert A. H. White; Lincoln Stein; Steven Henikoff; Manolis Kellis; Kevin P. White
• Keywords: CTCF; ChIA-PET; Chromatin immunoprecipitation

Insulators are DNA sequences that control the interactions among genomic regulatory elements and act as chromatin boundaries. A thorough understanding of their location function is necessary to address complexities metazoan gene regulation. We studied by ChIP–chip genome-wide binding sites 6 insulator-associated proteins—dCTCF, CP190, BEAF-32, Su(Hw), Mod(mdg4), GAF—to obtain first comprehensive map insulator in Drosophila embryos. identify over 14,000 putative insulators, including all classically defined insulators. find two major classes insulators dCTCF/CP190/BEAF-32 respectively. Distributional analyses revealed particular sub-classes excluded between cis-regulatory target promoters; divide differentially expressed, alternative, divergent boundaries; associated with chromosomal breakpoints species; embedded within active domains. Together, these results provide a demarcating boundaries units framework for during development evolution Drosophila.