Shaping the Nebulous Enhancer in the Era of High-Throughput Assays and Genome Editing
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CUHK Authors
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AbstractSince the 1st discovery of transcriptional enhancers in 1981, their textbook definition has remained largely unchanged in the past 37 years. With the emergence of high-throughput assays and genome editing, which are switching the paradigm from bottom-up discovery and testing of individual enhancers to top-down profiling of enhancer activities genome-wide, it has become increasingly evidenced that this classical definition has left substantial gray areas in different aspects. Here we survey a representative set of recent research articles and report the definitions of enhancers they have adopted. The results reveal that a wide spectrum of definitions is used usually without the definition stated explicitly, which could lead to difficulties in data interpretation and downstream analyses. Based on these findings, we discuss the practical implications and suggestions for future studies.
Acceptance Date26/02/2019
All Author(s) ListEdwin Yu-Kiu HO, Qin CAO, Mengting GU, Ricky Wai-Lun CHAN, Qiong WU, Mark GERSTEIN, Kevin Y. YIP
Journal nameBriefings in Bioinformatics
Year2020
Month5
Volume Number21
Issue Number3
Pages836 - 850
ISSN1467-5463
eISSN1477-4054
LanguagesEnglish-United States
Keywordsenhancers, cis-regulatory elements, transcriptional regulation, distance-independence, high-throughput
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