Identification of cis-regulatory elements by chromatin structure

The systematic identification of cis-regulatory elements (CREs) in plant genomes is critically important in understanding transcriptional regulation during development and in response to environmental cues. Several genome-wide structure-based methods have been successfully applied to plant genomes in the past few years. Here, we review recent results on the identification and characterization of CREs in multiple plant species and in different biological processes and discuss future applications of chromatin accessibility data to understand the mechanism, function and evolution of transcriptional regulation networks.