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A global genome segmentation method for exploration of epigenetic patterns

Steiner L, Hopp L, Wirth H, Galle J, Binder H, Prohaska SJ, Rohlf T

PloS one, 2012

Abstract

Current genome-wide ChIP-seq experiments on different epigenetic marks aim at unraveling the interplay between their regulation mechanisms. Published evaluation tools, however, allow testing for predefined hypotheses only. Here, we present a novel method for annotation-independent exploration of epigenetic data and their inter-correlation with other genome-wide features. Our method is based on a combinatorial genome segmentation solely using information on combinations of epigenetic marks. It does not require prior knowledge about the data (e.g. gene positions), but allows integrating the data in a straightforward manner. Thereby, it combines compression, clustering and visualization of the data in a single tool. Our method provides intuitive maps of epigenetic patterns across multiple levels of organization, e.g. of the co-occurrence of different epigenetic marks in different cell types. Thus, it facilitates the formulation of new hypotheses on the principles of epigenetic regulation. We apply our method to histone modification data on trimethylation of histone H3 at lysine 4, 9 and 27 in multi-potent and lineage-primed mouse cells, analyzing their combinatorial modification pattern as well as differentiation-related changes of single modifications. We demonstrate that our method is capable of reproducing recent findings of gene centered approaches, e.g. correlations between CpG-density and the analyzed histone modifications. Moreover, combining the clustered epigenetic…

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