RT Journal
A1 Chathoth, Keerthi T.
A1 Mikheeva, Liudmila A.
A1 Crevel, Gilles
A1 Wolfe, Jareth C.
A1 Hunter, Ioni
A1 Beckett-Doyle, Saskia
A1 Cotterill, Sue
A1 Dai, Hongsheng
A1 Harrison, Andrew
A1 Zabet, Nicolae Radu
T1 The role of insulators and transcription in 3D chromatin organization of flies
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2022 
FD April 01 
VO 32 
IS 4 
SP 682 
OP 698 
DO 10.1101/gr.275809.121 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/32/4/682.abstract 
AB The DNA in many organisms, including humans, is shown to be organized in topologically associating domains (TADs). In Drosophila, several architectural proteins are enriched at TAD borders, but it is still unclear whether these proteins play a functional role in the formation and maintenance of TADs. Here, we show that depletion of BEAF-32, Cp190, Chro, and Dref leads to changes in TAD organization and chromatin loops. Their depletion predominantly affects TAD borders located in regions moderately enriched in repressive modifications and depleted in active ones, whereas TAD borders located in euchromatin are resilient to these knockdowns. Furthermore, transcriptomic data has revealed hundreds of genes displaying differential expression in these knockdowns and showed that the majority of differentially expressed genes are located within reorganized TADs. Our work identifies a novel and functional role for architectural proteins at TAD borders in Drosophila and a link between TAD reorganization and subsequent changes in gene expression.