Congrats to Domenic on his new preprint: ZNF143 is not a looping factor after all

Congratulations to Domenic on his new preprint, which just appeared on BioRxiv.

After CTCF and cohesin, ZNF143 was identified to be the third most important loop factor with dozens of subsequent papers studying the looping function of ZNF143.

We wanted to follow up on this, but to our surprise found that ZNF143 is not a looping factor but a regular transcription factor.

Domenic very comprehensively dissected ZNF143 in both mouse and human cells, but no matter how we sliced the data, there is no loop function.

We teamed up with the lab of Elzo de Wit who show in their companion preprint that this originates due to a ZNF143 antibody used by ENCODE which cross-reacts with CTCF. They also find no looping function for ZNF143.

You can find the full preprints here:

Domenic's preprint

Magnitov, Maresca et al.'s preprint