About this Research Topic
The packing of DNA in the nucleus is a highly organized process and is relevant to gene regulation. In 2009, HiC was developed, a method enabling the study of genome-wide chromatin interaction. Since then, HiC and other techniques have revealed how chromatin is organized into domains and how these domains may affect gene regulation. In the past decade, studies have shown the importance of the chromatin structures regulate immunological processes, including V(D)J recombination and class-switch recombination that were published just in the past few months. This is an exciting and growing area of research and will be of interest not only to immunologists but to a more general audience as well.
Although DNA is usually illustrated as a linear line in most scientific presentations, this is far from the reality in the cells where DNA is organized into high-order structures and domains. Just in the past few months, several seminal papers have described the chromatin dynamics during class-switch recombination and V(D)J rearrangement; as well as how cohesin tethered enhancer to the promoter and the role of Mediator and RNA polymerase in gene regulation in embryonic stem cells, B cells, and T cells. The goal of this Research Topic is to spark further interest in this area of research by summarizing the recent exciting studies of higher-order chromatin structures/interaction (chromatin domain, loop extrusion, etc.) and their role in the immune system.
The scope of the Research Topic is to summarize our current understanding of the multi-dimensional genomic structure in the immune system. The implicated processes include, but not limited to, gene regulation, V(D)J recombination, DNA repair, somatic hypermutation, and class-switch recombination.
• Chromatin dynamics in B cells, T cells and innate immune cells.
• The molecular mechanisms governing of chromatin-chromatin interaction, such as the role of CTCF in chromatin looping and phase-separation of proteins.
• Implication of high dimensional genomic structure in understanding immunological diseases and hematopoietic malignancies.
• Application of high dimensional genomic data in correlating enhancers to promoters.
• Technical challenges in the generation, analysis, representation of multi-dimensional genomic data for immunologists.
Although DNA is usually illustrated as a linear line in most scientific presentations, this is far from the reality in the cells where DNA is organized into high-order structures and domains. Just in the past few months, several seminal papers have described the chromatin dynamics during class-switch recombination and V(D)J rearrangement; as well as how cohesin tethered enhancer to the promoter and the role of Mediator and RNA polymerase in gene regulation in embryonic stem cells, B cells, and T cells. The goal of this Research Topic is to spark further interest in this area of research by summarizing the recent exciting studies of higher-order chromatin structures/interaction (chromatin domain, loop extrusion, etc.) and their role in the immune system.
The scope of the Research Topic is to summarize our current understanding of the multi-dimensional genomic structure in the immune system. The implicated processes include, but not limited to, gene regulation, V(D)J recombination, DNA repair, somatic hypermutation, and class-switch recombination.
• Chromatin dynamics in B cells, T cells and innate immune cells.
• The molecular mechanisms governing of chromatin-chromatin interaction, such as the role of CTCF in chromatin looping and phase-separation of proteins.
• Implication of high dimensional genomic structure in understanding immunological diseases and hematopoietic malignancies.
• Application of high dimensional genomic data in correlating enhancers to promoters.
• Technical challenges in the generation, analysis, representation of multi-dimensional genomic data for immunologists.
Keywords: chromatin dynamics, B cells, T cells, VDJ, CTCF
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