Chromatin profiling, DamID and the emerging landscape of gene expression

Determining how genes are normally expressed throughout development and how they are mis-regulated in cancer is challenging. The availability of complete genome sequences, the advances in microarray technologies, and the development of novel functional genomic techniques such as ‘chromatin profiling’ facilitate dissection of the interplay among transcriptional networks and reveals chromosome organization in vivo. Recently, a novel methylation-based tagging technique, termed DamID (DNA adenine methyltransferase identification), has emerged as a powerful tool to decipher transcriptional networks, to study chromatin-associated proteins, and to monitor higher-order chromatin organization on a genome-wide scale. The molecular picture that emerges from DamID and similar studies is that genomes integrate inputs from both genetic and epigenetic machineries to dynamically regulate gene expression.