Measuring chromosome conformation with degenerate labels

Abstract

Although DNA conformation plays an integral role in all genetic processes from transcription to chromosome segregation, there is as yet no tractable method for capturing the in vivo conformation of a chromosome at high resolution. Labeling and fluorescently imaging thousands of loci along the chromosome would readily yield a conformation if each locus could be uniquely distinguished in the image, but this would unrealistically require thousands of distinguishable labels and a tedious experimental process. Here we present a computational method for extracting conformations when the total number of labels far exceeds the number of distinguishable labels. We evaluate our technique using simulated conformations with lengths ranging from 10 to 100 kilobases, and discuss the prospects for an experiment.