Insights into the cell fate decision-making processes from chromosome structural reorganizations

Large-scale data-driven and physics-based models offer insights into the relationships among the structures, dynamics, and functions of chromosomes

The organized three-dimensional chromosome architecture in the cell nucleus provides scaffolding for precise regulation of gene expression. When the cell changes its identity in the cell-fate decision-making process, extensive rearrangements of chromosome structures occur accompanied by large-scale adaptations of gene expression, underscoring the importance of chromosome dynamics in shaping genome function. Over the last two decades, rapid development of experimental methods has provided unprecedented data to characterize the hierarchical structures and dynamic properties of chromosomes. In parallel, these enormous data offer valuable opportunities for developing quantitative computational models. Here, we review a variety of large-scale polymer models developed to investigate the structures and dynamics of chromosomes. Different from the underlying modeling strategies, these approaches can be classified into data-driven ('top-down') and physics-based ('bottom-up') categories. We discuss their contributions to offering valuable insights into the relationships among the structures, dynamics, and functions of chromosomes and propose the perspective of developing data integration approaches from different experimental technologies and multidisciplinary theoretical/simulation methods combined with different modeling strategies.

Quantifying the large-scale chromosome structural dynamics during the mitosis-to-G1 phase transition of cell cycle

Cell cycle is known to be regulated by the underlying gene network. Chromosomes, which serve as the scaffold for gene expressions, undergo significant structural reorganizations during mitosis. Understanding the mechanism of the cell cycle from the chromosome structural perspective remains a grand challenge. In this study, we applied an integrated theoretical approach to investigate large-scale chromosome structural dynamics during the mitosis-to-G1 phase transition. We observed that the chromosome structural expansion and adaptation of the structural asphericity do not occur synchronously and attributed this behaviour to the unique unloading sequence of the two types of condensins. Furthermore, we observed that the coherent motions between the chromosomal loci are primarily enhanced within the topologically associating domains (TADs) as cells progress to the G1 phase, suggesting that TADs can be considered as both structural and dynamical units for organizing the three-dimensional chromosome. Our analysis also reveals that the quantified pathways of chromosome structural reorganization during the mitosis-to-G1 phase transition exhibit high stochasticity at the single-cell level and show nonlinear behaviours in changing TADs and contacts formed at the long-range regions. Our findings offer valuable insights into large-scale chromosome structural dynamics after mitosis.