New Single-Cell Method for Mapping DNA-Protein Interactions
From the Weill Cornell Medicine newsroom:
A new technology allows scientists to map, in single cells, the DNA binding sites of transcription factors and other regulatory proteins that control gene activity, according to a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center. With key advantages over methods currently in use, the technology is expected to be a powerful addition to biologists’ toolkit for studying cells in health and disease.
“D&D-seq,” as the new method is called, uses antibodies to bring a DNA-editing enzyme close to a target protein, allowing researchers to record where that protein interacts with DNA. The study describing the technique, published June 4 in Cell, showed that it surmounts key technical drawbacks of current methods for mapping protein-DNA interactions, and is the first of its kind that can be easily incorporated into high-throughput, single-cell “multi-omics” workflows.
“A lot of research has been held back because we didn't have the right tools for mapping DNA-protein interactions in single cells; and now that we have such a tool there is enormous excitement—it’s really a foundational technological advance,” said study co-senior author Dr. Dan Landau, the Bibliowicz Family Professor of Medicine and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center and the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell. Dr. Landau is also a core faculty member of the New York Genome Center.
The study’s other co-senior author is Dr. Ivan Raimondi, senior molecular biologist and research innovation director in the Landau Lab. Wei-Yu Chi, a doctoral candidate in the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and Dr. Sang-Ho Yoon, a postdoctoral associate in medicine in the Landau lab, are the co-first authors on the paper.
