Characterization of Chromatin Interaction in Mammalian Cells

Higher-order chromatin organization in cell nucleus is mysterious. Microscopy and high-throughput sequencing technologies have been applied to reveal the connections between genome structure and gene transcription, which is the main topic of my thesis. Higher-order chromatin organization differs across cell types and species, giving an insight into disease genesis and tumorigenesis. Despite an enormous progress has been made recently in epigenomic study, lots of things remain unknown. My dissertation reviews the current understanding of epigenomics, characterizes chromatin interaction in mammalian cells using different technologies, investigates chromatin reorganization in breast cancer cells, analyzes integrated genomic and epigenomic data in breast cancer metastasis and discusses results and future directions