Alisa MacCalman from the University of Exeter in the UK presented at the Nanopore Community Meeting in Boston this year. The title of the session is “Understanding the binding of multiple transcription factors by base-pair-resolution chromatin accessibility.” The lab is interested in regulatory regions of the genome and how they help encode the diversity of gene expression. They are interested in the pancreatic beta cell. The lab has found regulatory regions that are related to congenital hyperinsulinism. MacCalman worked on a method to detect multiple factors on the same DNA molecule. The approach uses an adapted footprinting methodology. DNA from cells/tissue is isolated from nuclei and prepared for methylation-sensitive sequencing. Information can be obtained on the accessiblity of regions. The approach can be used to detect regulatory activity. MacCalman ended by mentioning that they are currently using cell lines and will move on to using in vivo models. I am curious about the approach and want to learn how difficult it is to prepare the sequencing libraries.
