Visualizing the Role of Boundary Elements in Enhancer-Promoter Communication

Abstract

Formation of self-associating loop domains is a fundamental organizational feature of metazoan genomes. Here, we employed quantitative live-imaging methods to visualize impacts of higher-order chromosome topology on enhancer-promoter communication in developing Drosophila embryos. Evidence is provided that distal enhancers effectively produce transcriptional bursting from target promoters over distances when they are flanked with boundary elements. Importantly, neither inversion nor deletion of a boundary element abrogates this "enhancer-assisting activity," suggesting that they can facilitate intra-domain enhancer-promoter interaction and production of transcriptional bursting independently of topologically associating domain (TAD) formation. In contrast, domain-skipping activity of distal enhancers was lost after disruption of topological domains. This observation raises a possibility that intra-domain and inter-domain enhancer-promoter interactions are differentially regulated by chromosome topology.