With great resolution comes great price and manpower requirements, so the demand for a happy medium has remained at large for all those trying to catch some chromatin conformation. New players like Capture-C have stepped up to the plate and now Researchers from the Erasmus University Medical Center (The Netherlands) announce T2C: Targeted Chromatin Capture.
Chromosome conformation capture (3C) has made enormous contributions to our appreciation of nuclear architecture and the intricacies of regulating gene expression. However, in today’s technologically demanding world, it’s not often that a technique this important stays low throughput. Not so surprisingly, we’ve seen developments towards high throughput; like Hi-C, which provides a genome-wide perspective. But then along came T2C; here’s all the specs:
- T2C offers a select genomic perspective, landing somewhere between 3C and HiC.
- Based off of restriction enzymes, it allows for a fragment resolution of 2 to 6 kbp compared to the 40 kbp of Hi-C.
- The cost is a fraction of Hi-C, as it’s a less intensive sequencing effort.
The report also provides experimental validation of the true power of T2C by looking at some previously ‘C’d’ model regions, the mouse beta-globin locus and the imprinted human H19/IGF2 locus. Not so surprisingly, the experiments confirm distinct compartments seen by all the other 3C based methods and offer additional novel insights into transcriptional regulation and chromatin-protein interactions. The team is left concluding that “T2C is an efficient, easy, and affordable with high (restriction fragment) resolution tool to address both genome compartmentalization and chromatin-interaction networks for specific genomic regions.”
Check out the affordable high resolution of T2C in Epigenetics and Chromatin, July 2014