Global Protein-DNA interactions

Genomics is the study of the complete genomes. Proteomics is the study of the entire set of proteins, protein complexes, and protein modifications. Transcriptomics is the study of the entire set of transcripts. None of these categories describe which protein complexes interact with DNA under different conditions. A major future goal, therefore, is to describe dynamic global protein-DNA interactions, chromatin structure and chromatin modifications in the cell, the Chromatome. Chromatomics exploits a technique known as "ChIP on chip" to study genome wide chromatin structure. ChIP assays are used to purify DNA target sequences bound to a protein of interest. The purified target DNA is then labeled and hybridized to microarrays spotted with thousands of genomic sequences. This approach allows us to identify hundreds of targets for any transcription factor of interest.