An Expanding Toolkit for Heterochromatin Repair Studies

Pericentromeric heterochromatin is mostly composed of repetitive DNA sequences prone to aberrant recombination. Cells have developed highly specialized mechanisms to enable ‘safe’ homologous recombination (HR) repair while preventing aberrant recombination in this domain. Understanding heterochromatin repair responses is essential to understanding the critical mechanisms responsible for genome integrity and tumor suppression. Here, we review the tools, approaches, and methods currently available to investigate double-strand break (DSB) repair in pericentromeric regions, and also suggest how technologies recently developed for euchromatin repair studies can be adapted to characterize responses in heterochromatin. With this ever-growing toolkit, we are witnessing exciting progress in our understanding of how the ‘dark matter’ of the genome is repaired, greatly improving our understanding of genome stability mechanisms.