Insulated Neighborhoods: Structural and Functional Units of Mammalian Gene Control

Understanding how transcriptional enhancers control over 20,000 protein-coding genes to maintain cell-type-specific gene expression programs in all human cells is a fundamental challenge in regulatory biology. Recent studies suggest that gene regulatory elements and their target genes generally occur within insulated neighborhoods, which are chromosomal loop structures formed by the interaction of two DNA sites bound by the CTCF protein and...