Abstract
Evidence has emerged in recent years linking insulators and the proteins that bind them to the higher order structure of animal chromatin, but the precise nature of this relationship and the manner by which insulators influence chromatin structure have remained elusive. Here we present high-resolution genome-wide chromatin conformation capture (Hi-C) data from early Drosophila melanogaster embryos that allow us to map three-dimensional interactions to 500 base pairs. We observe a complex, nested pattern of regions of chromatin self-association, and use a combination of computational and manual annotation to identify boundaries between these topological associated domains (TADs). We demonstrate that, when mapped at high resolution, boundaries resemble classical insulators: short (500 - 1000 bp) genomic regions that are sensitive to DNase digestion and strongly bound by known insulator proteins. Strikingly, we show that for regions where the banding pattern of polytene chromosomes has been mapped to genomic position at comparably high resolution, there is a perfect correspondence between polytene banding and our chromatin conformation maps, with boundary insulators forming the interband regions that separate compacted bands that correspond to TADs. We propose that this precise, high-resolution relationship between insulators and TADs on the one hand and polytene bands and interbands on the other extends across the genome, and suggest a model in which the decompaction of insulator regions drives the organization of interphase chromosomes by creating stable physical separation between adjacent domains.
