Prediction of nucleosome positioning based on transcription factor binding sites

Nucleosome Positioning with Set of Key Positions and Nucleosome Affinity

The formation and precise positioning of nucleosome in chromatin occupies a very important role in studying life process. Today, there are many researchers who discovered that the positioning where the location of a DNA sequence fragment wraps around a histone octamer in genome is not random but regular. However, the positioning is closely relevant to the concrete sequence of core DNA. So in this paper, we analyzed the relation between the affinity and sequence structure of core DNA, and extracted the set of key positions. In these positions, the nucleotide sequences probably occupy mainly action in the binding. First, we simplified and formatted the experimental data with the affinity. Then, to find the key positions in the wrapping, we used neural network to analyze the positive and negative effects of nucleosome generation for each position in core DNA sequences. However, we reached a class of weights with every position to describe this effect. Finally, based on the positions with high weights, we analyzed the reason why the chosen positions are key positions, and used these positions to construct a model for nucleosome positioning prediction. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

Identifying cooperative transcription factors in yeast using multiple data sources

BACKGROUND

Transcriptional regulation of gene expression is usually accomplished by multiple interactive transcription factors (TFs). Therefore, it is crucial to understand the precise cooperative interactions among TFs. Various kinds of experimental data including ChIP-chip, TF binding site (TFBS), gene expression, TF knockout and protein-protein interaction data have been used to identify cooperative TF pairs in existing methods. The nucleosome occupancy data is not yet used for this research topic despite that several researches have revealed the association between nucleosomes and TFBSs.

RESULTS

In this study, we developed a novel method to infer the cooperativity between two TFs by integrating the TF-gene documented regulation, TFBS and nucleosome occupancy data. TF-gene documented regulation and TFBS data were used to determine the target genes of a TF, and the genome-wide nucleosome occupancy data was used to assess the nucleosome occupancy on TFBSs. Our method identifies cooperative TF pairs based on two biologically plausible assumptions. If two TFs cooperate, then (i) they should have a significantly higher number of common target genes than random expectation and (ii) their binding sites (in the promoters of their common target genes) should tend to be co-depleted of nucleosomes in order to make these binding sites simultaneously accessible to TF binding. Each TF pair is given a cooperativity score by our method. The higher the score is, the more likely a TF pair has cooperativity. Finally, a list of 27 cooperative TF pairs has been predicted by our method. Among these 27 TF pairs, 19 pairs are also predicted by existing methods. The other 8 pairs are novel cooperative TF pairs predicted by our method. The biological relevance of these 8 novel cooperative TF pairs is justified by the existence of protein-protein interactions and co-annotation in the same MIPS functional categories. Moreover, we adopted three performance indices to compare our predictions with 11 existing methods' predictions. We show that our method performs better than these 11 existing methods in identifying cooperative TF pairs in yeast. Finally, the cooperative TF network constructed from the 27 predicted cooperative TF pairs shows that our method has the power to find cooperative TF pairs of different biological processes.

CONCLUSION

Our method is effective in identifying cooperative TF pairs in yeast. Many of our predictions are validated by the literature, and our method outperforms 11 existing methods. We believe that our study will help biologists to understand the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in eukaryotic cells.

MACE: model based analysis of ChIP-exo

Understanding the role of a given transcription factor (TF) in regulating gene expression requires precise mapping of its binding sites in the genome. Chromatin immunoprecipitation-exo, an emerging technique using λ exonuclease to digest TF unbound DNA after ChIP, is designed to reveal transcription factor binding site (TFBS) boundaries with near-single nucleotide resolution. Although ChIP-exo promises deeper insights into transcription regulation, no dedicated bioinformatics tool exists to leverage its advantages. Most ChIP-seq and ChIP-chip analytic methods are not tailored for ChIP-exo, and thus cannot take full advantage of high-resolution ChIP-exo data. Here we describe a novel analysis framework, termed MACE (model-based analysis of ChIP-exo) dedicated to ChIP-exo data analysis. The MACE workflow consists of four steps: (i) sequencing data normalization and bias correction; (ii) signal consolidation and noise reduction; (iii) single-nucleotide resolution border peak detection using the Chebyshev Inequality and (iv) border matching using the Gale-Shapley stable matching algorithm. When applied to published human CTCF, yeast Reb1 and our own mouse ONECUT1/HNF6 ChIP-exo data, MACE is able to define TFBSs with high sensitivity, specificity and spatial resolution, as evidenced by multiple criteria including motif enrichment, sequence conservation, direct sequence pileup, nucleosome positioning and open chromatin states. In addition, we show that the fundamental advance of MACE is the identification of two boundaries of a TFBS with high resolution, whereas other methods only report a single location of the same event. The two boundaries help elucidate the in vivo binding structure of a given TF, e.g. whether the TF may bind as dimers or in a complex with other co-factors.

Training-free atomistic prediction of nucleosome occupancy

Nucleosomes alter gene expression by preventing transcription factors from occupying binding sites along DNA. DNA methylation can affect nucleosome positioning and so alter gene expression epigenetically (without changing DNA sequence). Conventional methods to predict nucleosome occupancy are trained on observed DNA sequence patterns or known DNA oligonucleotide structures. They are statistical and lack the physics needed to predict subtle epigenetic changes due to DNA methylation. The training-free method presented here uses physical principles and state-of-the-art all-atom force fields to predict both nucleosome occupancy along genomic sequences as well as binding to known positioning sequences. Our method calculates the energy of both nucleosomal and linear DNA of the given sequence. Based on the DNA deformation energy, we accurately predict the in vitro occupancy profile observed experimentally for a 20,000-bp genomic region as well as the experimental locations of nucleosomes along 13 well-established positioning sequence elements. DNA with all C bases methylated at the 5 position shows less variation of nucleosome binding: Strong binding is weakened and weak binding is strengthened compared with normal DNA. Methylation also alters the preference of nucleosomes for some positioning sequences but not others.

Structure-based identification of new high-affinity nucleosome binding sequences

The substrate for the proteins that express genetic information in the cell is not naked DNA but an assembly of nucleosomes, where the DNA is wrapped around histone proteins. The organization of these nucleosomes on genomic DNA is influenced by the DNA sequence. Here, we present a structure-based computational approach that translates sequence information into the energy required to bend DNA into a nucleosome-bound conformation. The calculations establish the relationship between DNA sequence and histone octamer binding affinity. In silico selection using this model identified several new DNA sequences, which were experimentally found to have histone octamer affinities comparable to the highest-affinity sequences known. The results provide insights into the molecular mechanism through which DNA sequence information encodes its organization. A quantitative appreciation of the thermodynamics of nucleosome positioning and rearrangement will be one of the key factors in understanding the regulation of transcription and in the design of new promoter architectures for the purposes of tuning gene expression dynamics.