have a role in chromatin regulation [38]. Bauer and co-workers utilized 3C to identify BCL11A as the gene target of an erythroid enhancer, and then further demonstrated the impact of enhancer variants on transcription factor binding and expression. Gene editing strategies have also been employed to demonstrate that this enhancer is essential for erythroid gene expression [28]. Finally, we highlight a study by Smemo and colleagues in which 4C-seq was used to identify IRX3 as the target of an enhancer SNP located in intron 1 of the FTO gene, which was originally thought to be the target and therefore the causal gene for increased risk of obesity. Functional studies in mice were used to verify that IRX3 is the most likely causal gene, not FTO [30].
