Charting functional and physical properties of chromatin in living cells

With the vast transcriptome database now available, global patterns of gene expression have been mapped in various species to reveal higher order structures in the genome. Location-dependent control of gene expression has also been studied in human cell cultures and in Arabidopsis plants using well-characterized insertion and transposition cell line collections. With the added genome-wide mapping of chromatin features at a high resolution, via advanced microarray and sequencing technologies, comprehensive analysis of structure–function relationships deduced from chromatin organization and gene expression data is now feasible. This has begun to reveal micro-heterogeneity in the genome with respect to structural and functional segmentations.