Cis-regulatory landscapes in development and evolution

The recent advances in our understanding of the 3D organization of the chromatin together with an almost unlimited ability to detect cis-regulatory elements genome-wide using different biochemical signatures has provided us with an unprecedented power to study gene regulation. It is now possible to profile the complete regulatory apparatus controlling the spatio-temporal expression of any given gene, the so-called gene Regulatory Landscapes (RLs). Here we review several studies over the last two years demonstrating the functional consequences of altering RL structure in development, disease and evolution. These works clearly show that a deep understanding of transcriptional regulation is no longer conceivable without considering the 3D modular organization of animal genomes.