A new tool to study complex genome interactions
Originally published by Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine on June 19, 2023 Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain People who owned black-and-white television sets until the 1980s didn't know what they were missing until they got a color TV. A similar switch could happen in the world of genomics as researchers at the Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) have developed a technique called Genome Architecture Mapping ("GAM") to peer into the genome and see it in glorious technicolor. GAM reveals information about the genome's spatial architecture that is invisible to scientists using solely Hi-C, a workhorse tool developed in 2009 to study DNA interactions, reports a new study in Nature Methods by the Pombo lab . "With a black-and-white TV, you can see the shapes but everything looks gray," says Professor Ana Pombo , a molecular biologist and head of the Epigenetic Regulation and Chromatin Archit