DamID as an approach to studying long-distance chromatin interactions

How transcription is controlled by distally located cis-regulatory elements is an active area of research in biology. As such, there have been many techniques developed to probe these long-distance chromatin interactions. Here, we focus on one such method, called DamID (van Steensel and Henikoff, Nat Biotechnol 18(4):424-428, 2000). While other methods like 3C (Dekker et al., Science 295(5558):1306-1311, 2002), 4C (Simonis et al., Nat Genet 38(11):1348-1354, 2006; Zhao et al., Nat Genet 38(11):1341-1347, 2006), and 5C (Dostie et al., Genome Res 16(10):1299-1309, 2006) are undoubtedly powerful, the DamID method can offer some advantages over these methods if the genetic locus can be easily modified. The lack of tissue fixation, the low amounts of starting material required to perform the experiment, and the relatively modest hardware requirements make DamID experiments an interesting alternative to consider when examining long-distance chromatin interactions.