Profiling gene expression in specific cell types without their isolation is an important challenge in developmental biology. Working in fruit flies, Southall et al. fused a Drosophila melanogaster RNA polymerase II (Pol II) subunit to an Escherichia coli DNA adenine methyltransferase (Dam). This fusion was expressed under the control of a neural stem cell enhancer, so the authors named this method targeted DamID (TaDa). As DNA adenine methylation does not naturally occur in most eukaryotes, the timecourse of adenine methylation patterns in whole D. melanogaster brains was used to infer Pol II occupancy and gene expression profiles in neural stem cells. This system is applicable to the characterization of genome-binding profiles of different proteins in various cell types and model organisms.