Expression profiling by high throughput sequencing Genome binding/occupancy profiling by high throughput sequencing Other
Summary
The three-dimensional genomic structure plays a critical role in gene expression, cellular differentiation, and pathological conditions. Previous studies have extensively investigated the structures including A/B compartments and topologically associating domains (TADs) at a scale from hundreds of kilobases (kb) to megabases (Mb). However, fine-scale chromatin architectures, particularly enhancer-promoter interactions, which are often within 100 kb and critical for the temporospatial regulation of expression, remain to be fully characterized due to technical limitations. In this study, we report Hi-TrAC as a proximity ligation free, robust, and sensitive technique to profile genome-wide chromatin interactions at high-resolution among accessible regulatory elements. Hi-TrAC detects chromatin looping among accessible chromatin regions at single nucleosome resolution. We observed that cell-specifically expressed genes are harbored in active sub-TADs. With almost half million identified loops, we constructed a comprehensive interaction network of regulatory elements across the genome. After integrating chromatin binding profiles of transcription factors (TFs), we discovered that cohesin complex and CTCF are responsible for organizing long-range chromatin loops, which are related with domain formation, whereas ZNF143 and HCFC1 are involved in structuring short-range chromatin loops between regulatory elements, which directly regulate gene expression. Thus, here we developed a new methodology to identify a delicate and comprehensive network of cis regulatory elements, revealing the complexity and a division of labor of TFs in chromatin looping for genome organization and gene expression.
Overall design
The genome structure of GM12878, K562 and mESC cells was studied by a newly developed technique Hi-TrAC. Chromatin binding profiles of architectural proteins CTCF, RAD21, HCFC1 and ZNF143 were studied by ChIP-seq. The effect of these four proteins on gene expression was investigated by RNA-seq, accessbility changes were studied by ATAC-seq, changes of chromatin interactions were also validated by Hi-C.
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