4C

Chromosome conformation capture-on-chip (4C) is an extension of the 3C (Chromosome conformation capture) technique that studies 3-dimensional organisation and interaction of chromatin in a cell. 4C captures interactions between one specific locus and all other genomic loci. It involves a second ligation step, to create self-circularized DNA fragments, which are used to perform inverse PCR. Inverse PCR allows the known sequence to be used to amplify the unknown sequence ligated to it. In contrast to 3C and 5C, the 4C technique does not require the prior knowledge of both interacting chromosomal regions. Results obtained using 4C are highly reproducible with most of the interactions that are detected between regions proximal to one another. On a single microarray, approximately a million interactions can be analyzed.