Enrichment analysis of Alu elements with different spatial chromatin proximity in the human genome.

Transposable elements (TEs) have no longer been totally considered as "junk DNA" for quite a time since the continual discoveries of their multifunctional roles in eukaryote genomes. As one of the most important and abundant TEs that still active in human genome, Alu, a SINE family, has demonstrated its indispensable regulatory functions at sequence level, but its spatial roles are still unclear. Technologies based on 3C (chromosome conformation capture) have revealed the mysterious three-dimensional structure of chromatin, and make it possible to study the distal chromatin interaction in the genome.