The discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick in 1953 was the first report showing that the genomic information is not contained in a stretched linear molecule. After that, a huge advance in the knowledge of the structure of the eukaryotic genome in the nuclear space has been made over the last decades, bringing us to the widely accepted concept that the genome is packaged into hierarchical levels of higher-order three-dimensional structures. The spatial organization of the eukaryotic genome has direct influence on fundamental nuclear processes that include transcription, replication, and DNA repair. The idea that structural alterations of chromosomes may cause disease goes back to the early nineteenth century. Big effort has been devoted to the study of the three-dimensional architecture of the genome and its functional implications. In this chapter, I will describe the chromosome conformation capture (3C), one of the first techniques used to detect and measure the frequency of interactions between genomic sequences that are kept in spatial proximity in the nucleus.
Keywords: Chromatin architecture; Chromosome conformation capture; DNA loops; Drosophila melanogaster.