Abstract
Recent findings demonstrate that chromatin dynamics and nuclear organization are not only important for gene regulation but also for the maintenance of genome stability. Thanks to novel techniques that allow the visualization of specific chromatin domains in living cells, recent studies have demonstrated that the spatial dynamics of double-strand breaks and modifying enzymes can influence repair. The importance of the spatial organization in the repair of DNA damage has been confirmed by demonstrating that perturbation of nuclear organization can lead to gene amplifications, deletions, translocations and end-to-end telomere fusion events.
Acknowledgements
We would like to particularly thank Marc Gasser and Thierry Laroche for the homolog pairing analysis, and Vincent Dion, Anna Friedel and Kenji Shimada for discussions and suggestions on the manuscript.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
The authors thank the Swiss National Research Foundation NCCR ‘Frontiers in Genetics‘ and Novartis Research Foundation for supporting their research. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.