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Is a super-enhancer greater than the sum of its parts?

Nature Genetics volume 49, pages 2–3 (2017)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

The recent back-to-back articles by Hay et al.1 and Shin et al.2 both addressed the important question of how the constituent enhancers of a so-called 'super-enhancer' combine to activate the expression of a target gene. Super-enhancers are collections of closely spaced genomic regions that exhibit hallmarks of enhancers, such as binding by the Mediator complex and acetylation of histone H3 at lysine 27 (H3K27ac)3,4,5. As the authors of these articles noted1,2, there is continuing controversy over whether super-enhancers genuinely represent a new paradigm in transcriptional regulation or whether they may essentially just be clusters of conventional enhancers that together produce a strong transcriptional response6.

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Figure 1: Generalized linear models applied to published knockout data for the α-globin and Wap super-enhancers.

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank the authors of refs. 1 and 2 for providing their raw data. We thank B. Cohen, C. Danko and J. Lis for comments on the manuscript and J. Kinney for useful discussions about biophysical models. This research was supported in part by US National Institutes of Health grants GM102192 and HG007070. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health.

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  1. Noah Dukler, Brad Gulko and Yi-Fei Huang: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA

    Noah Dukler, Brad Gulko, Yi-Fei Huang & Adam Siepel

  2. Graduate Field of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

    Brad Gulko

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  1. Noah Dukler
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  2. Brad Gulko
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  4. Adam Siepel
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Correspondence to Adam Siepel.

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Dukler, N., Gulko, B., Huang, YF. et al. Is a super-enhancer greater than the sum of its parts?. Nat Genet 49, 2–3 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3759

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