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Abstract
Background
Super-enhancers are clusters of enhancer elements that play critical roles in the
maintenance of cell identity. Current investigations on super-enhancers are centered
on the established ones in static cell types. How super-enhancers are established
during cell differentiation remains obscure.
Results
Here, by developing an unbiased approach to systematically analyze the evolving landscape
of super-enhancers during cell differentiation in multiple lineages, we discover a
general trend where super-enhancers emerge through three distinct temporal patterns:
conserved, temporally hierarchical, and de novo. The three types of super-enhancers
differ further in association patterns in target gene expression, functional enrichment,
and 3D chromatin organization, suggesting they may represent distinct structural and
functional subtypes. Furthermore, we dissect the enhancer repertoire within temporally
hierarchical super-enhancers, and find enhancers that emerge at early and late stages
are enriched with distinct transcription factors, suggesting that the temporal order
of establishment of elements within super-enhancers may be directed by underlying
DNA sequence. CRISPR-mediated deletion of individual enhancers in differentiated cells
shows that both the early- and late-emerged enhancers are indispensable for target
gene expression, while in undifferentiated cells early enhancers are involved in the
regulation of target genes.
Conclusions
In summary, our analysis highlights the heterogeneity of the super-enhancer population
and provides new insights to enhancer functions within super-enhancers.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13059-021-02485-x.
Motivation: Testing for correlations between different sets of genomic features is a fundamental task in genomics research. However, searching for overlaps between features with existing web-based methods is complicated by the massive datasets that are routinely produced with current sequencing technologies. Fast and flexible tools are therefore required to ask complex questions of these data in an efficient manner. Results: This article introduces a new software suite for the comparison, manipulation and annotation of genomic features in Browser Extensible Data (BED) and General Feature Format (GFF) format. BEDTools also supports the comparison of sequence alignments in BAM format to both BED and GFF features. The tools are extremely efficient and allow the user to compare large datasets (e.g. next-generation sequencing data) with both public and custom genome annotation tracks. BEDTools can be combined with one another as well as with standard UNIX commands, thus facilitating routine genomics tasks as well as pipelines that can quickly answer intricate questions of large genomic datasets. Availability and implementation: BEDTools was written in C++. Source code and a comprehensive user manual are freely available at http://code.google.com/p/bedtools Contact: aaronquinlan@gmail.com; imh4y@virginia.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Background The determination of the 'cistrome', the genome-wide set of in vivo cis-elements bound by trans-factors [1], is necessary to determine the genes that are directly regulated by those trans-factors. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) [2] coupled with genome tiling microarrays (ChIP-chip) [3,4] and sequencing (ChIP-Seq) [5-8] have become popular techniques to identify cistromes. Although early ChIP-Seq efforts were limited by sequencing throughput and cost [2,9], tremendous progress has been achieved in the past year in the development of next generation massively parallel sequencing. Tens of millions of short tags (25-50 bases) can now be simultaneously sequenced at less than 1% the cost of traditional Sanger sequencing methods. Technologies such as Illumina's Solexa or Applied Biosystems' SOLiD™ have made ChIP-Seq a practical and potentially superior alternative to ChIP-chip [5,8]. While providing several advantages over ChIP-chip, such as less starting material, lower cost, and higher peak resolution, ChIP-Seq also poses challenges (or opportunities) in the analysis of data. First, ChIP-Seq tags represent only the ends of the ChIP fragments, instead of precise protein-DNA binding sites. Although tag strand information and the approximate distance to the precise binding site could help improve peak resolution, a good tag to site distance estimate is often unknown to the user. Second, ChIP-Seq data exhibit regional biases along the genome due to sequencing and mapping biases, chromatin structure and genome copy number variations [10]. These biases could be modeled if matching control samples are sequenced deeply enough. However, among the four recently published ChIP-Seq studies [5-8], one did not have a control sample [5] and only one of the three with control samples systematically used them to guide peak finding [8]. That method requires peaks to contain significantly enriched tags in the ChIP sample relative to the control, although a small ChIP peak region often contains too few control tags to robustly estimate the background biases. Here, we present Model-based Analysis of ChIP-Seq data, MACS, which addresses these issues and gives robust and high resolution ChIP-Seq peak predictions. We conducted ChIP-Seq of FoxA1 (hepatocyte nuclear factor 3α) in MCF7 cells for comparison with FoxA1 ChIP-chip [1] and identification of features unique to each platform. When applied to three human ChIP-Seq datasets to identify binding sites of FoxA1 in MCF7 cells, NRSF (neuron-restrictive silencer factor) in Jurkat T cells [8], and CTCF (CCCTC-binding factor) in CD4+ T cells [5] (summarized in Table S1 in Additional data file 1), MACS gives results superior to those produced by other published ChIP-Seq peak finding algorithms [8,11,12]. Results Modeling the shift size of ChIP-Seq tags ChIP-Seq tags represent the ends of fragments in a ChIP-DNA library and are often shifted towards the 3' direction to better represent the precise protein-DNA interaction site. The size of the shift is, however, often unknown to the experimenter. Since ChIP-DNA fragments are equally likely to be sequenced from both ends, the tag density around a true binding site should show a bimodal enrichment pattern, with Watson strand tags enriched upstream of binding and Crick strand tags enriched downstream. MACS takes advantage of this bimodal pattern to empirically model the shifting size to better locate the precise binding sites. Given a sonication size (bandwidth) and a high-confidence fold-enrichment (mfold), MACS slides 2bandwidth windows across the genome to find regions with tags more than mfold enriched relative to a random tag genome distribution. MACS randomly samples 1,000 of these high-quality peaks, separates their Watson and Crick tags, and aligns them by the midpoint between their Watson and Crick tag centers (Figure 1a) if the Watson tag center is to the left of the Crick tag center. The distance between the modes of the Watson and Crick peaks in the alignment is defined as 'd', and MACS shifts all the tags by d/2 toward the 3' ends to the most likely protein-DNA interaction sites. Figure 1 MACS model for FoxA1 ChIP-Seq. (a,b) The 5' ends of strand-separated tags from a random sample of 1,000 model peaks, aligned by the center of their Watson and Crick peaks (a) and by the FKHR motif (b). (c) The tag count in ChIP versus control in 10 kb windows across the genome. Each dot represents a 10 kb window; red dots are windows containing ChIP peaks and black dots are windows containing control peaks used for FDR calculation. (d) Tag density profile in control samples around FoxA1 ChIP-Seq peaks. (e,f) MACS improves the motif occurrence in the identified peak centers (e) and the spatial resolution (f) for FoxA1 ChIP-Seq through tag shifting and λlocal. Peaks are ranked by p-value. The motif occurrence is calculated as the percentage of peaks with the FKHR motif within 50 bp of the peak summit. The spatial resolution is calculated as the average distance from the summit to the nearest FKHR motif. Peaks with no FKHR motif within 150 bp of the peak summit are removed from the spatial resolution calculation. When applied to FoxA1 ChIP-Seq, which was sequenced with 3.9 million uniquely mapped tags, MACS estimates the d to be only 126 bp (Figure 1a; suggesting a tag shift size of 63 bp), despite a sonication size (bandwidth) of around 500 bp and Solexa size-selection of around 200 bp. Since the FKHR motif sequence dictates the precise FoxA1 binding location, the true distribution of d could be estimated by aligning the tags by the FKHR motif (122 bp; Figure 1b), which gives a similar result to the MACS model. When applied to NRSF and CTCF ChIP-Seq, MACS also estimates a reasonable d solely from the tag distribution: for NRSF ChIP-Seq the MACS model estimated d as 96 bp compared to the motif estimate of 70 bp; applied to CTCF ChIP-Seq data the MACS model estimated a d of 76 bp compared to the motif estimate of 62 bp. Peak detection For experiments with a control, MACS linearly scales the total control tag count to be the same as the total ChIP tag count. Sometimes the same tag can be sequenced repeatedly, more times than expected from a random genome-wide tag distribution. Such tags might arise from biases during ChIP-DNA amplification and sequencing library preparation, and are likely to add noise to the final peak calls. Therefore, MACS removes duplicate tags in excess of what is warranted by the sequencing depth (binomial distribution p-value 2). Among the remaining 34.6% ChIP-Seq unique peaks, 1,045 (13.3%) were not tiled or only partially tiled on the arrays due to the array design. Therefore, only 21.4% of ChIP-Seq peaks are indeed specific to the sequencing platform. Furthermore, ChIP-chip targets with higher fold-enrichments are more likely to be reproducibly detected by ChIP-Seq with a higher tag count (Figure 3b). Meanwhile, although the signals of array probes at the ChIP-Seq specific peak regions are below the peak-calling cutoff, they show moderate signal enrichments that are significantly higher than the genomic background (Wilcoxon p-value 2) and ChIP-Seq (MACS; FDR <1%). Shown are the numbers of regions detected by both platforms (that is, having at least 1 bp in common) or unique to each platform. (b) The distributions of ChIP-Seq tag number and ChIP-chip MATscore [13] for FoxA1 binding sites identified by both platforms. (c) MATscore distributions of FoxA1 ChIP-chip at ChIP-Seq/chip overlapping peaks, ChIP-Seq unique peaks, and genome background. For each peak, the mean MATscore for all probes within the 300 bp region centered at the ChIP-Seq peak summit is used. Genome background is based on MATscores of all array probes in the FoxA1 ChIP-chip data. (d) Width distributions of FoxA1 ChIP-Seq/chip overlapping peaks and ChIP-Seq unique peaks at different fold-enrichments (less than 25, 25 to 50, and larger than 50). (e) Spatial resolution for FoxA1 ChIP-chip and ChIP-Seq peaks. The Wilcoxon test was used to calculate the p-values for (d) and (e). (f) Motif occurrence within the central 200 bp regions for FoxA1 ChIP-Seq/chip overlapping peaks and platform unique peaks. Error bars showing standard deviation were calculated from random sampling of 500 peaks ten times for each category. Background motif occurrences are based on 100,000 randomly selected 200 bp regions in the human genome, excluding regions in genome assembly gaps (containing 'N'). Comparing the difference between ChIP-chip and ChIP-Seq peaks, we find that the average peak width from ChIP-chip is twice as large as that from ChIP-Seq. The average distance from peak summit to motif is significantly smaller in ChIP-Seq than ChIP-chip (Figure 3e), demonstrating the superior resolution of ChIP-Seq. Under the same 1% FDR cutoff, the FKHR motif occurrence within the central 200 bp from ChIP-chip or ChIP-Seq specific peaks is comparable with that from the overlapping peaks (Figure 3f). This suggests that most of the platform-specific peaks are genuine binding sites. A comparison between NRSF ChIP-Seq and ChIP-chip (Figure S3 in Additional data file 1) yields similar results, although the overlapping peaks for NRSF are of much better quality than the platform-specific peaks. Discussion ChIP-Seq users are often curious as to whether they have sequenced deep enough to saturate all the binding sites. In principle, sequencing saturation should be dependent on the fold-enrichment, since higher-fold peaks are saturated earlier than lower-fold ones. In addition, due to different cost and throughput considerations, different users might be interested in recovering sites at different fold-enrichment cutoffs. Therefore, MACS produces a saturation table to report, at different fold-enrichments, the proportion of sites that could still be detected when using 90% to 20% of the tags. Such tables produced for FoxA1 (3.9 million tags) and NRSF (2.2 million tags) ChIP-Seq data sets (Figure S4 in Additional data file 1; CTCF does not have a control to robustly estimate fold-enrichment) show that while peaks with over 60-fold enrichment have been saturated, deeper sequencing could still recover more sites less than 40-fold enriched relative to the chromatin input DNA. As sequencing technologies improve their throughput, researchers are gradually increasing their sequencing depth, so this question could be revisited in the future. For now, we leave it up to individual users to make an informed decision on whether to sequence more based on the saturation at different fold-enrichment levels. The d modeled by MACS suggests that some short read sequencers such as Solexa may preferentially sequence shorter fragments in a ChIP-DNA pool. This may contribute to the superior resolution observed in ChIP-Seq data, especially for activating transcription and epigenetic factors in open chromatin. However, for repressive factors targeting relatively compact chromatin, the target regions might be harder to sonicate into the soluble extract. Furthermore, in the resulting ChIP-DNA, the true targets may tend to be longer than the background DNA in open chromatin, making them unfavorable for size-selection and sequencing. This implies that epigenetic markers of closed chromatin may be harder to ChIP, and even harder to ChIP-Seq. To assess this potential bias, examining the histone mark ChIP-Seq results from Mikkelsen et al. [7], we find that while the ChIP-Seq efficiency of the active mark H3K4me3 remains high as pluripotent cells differentiate, that of repressive marks H3K27me3 and H3K9me3 becomes lower with differentiation (Table S2 in Additional data file 1), even though it is likely that there are more targets for these repressive marks as cells differentiate. We caution ChIP-Seq users to adopt measures to compensate for this bias when ChIPing repressive marks, such as more vigorous sonication, size-selecting slightly bigger fragments for library preparation, or sonicating the ChIP-DNA further between decrosslinking and library preparation. MACS calculates the FDR based on the number of peaks from control over ChIP that are called at the same p-value cutoff. This FDR estimate is more robust than calculating the FDR from randomizing tags along the genome. However, we notice that when tag counts from ChIP and controls are not balanced, the sample with more tags often gives more peaks even though MACS normalizes the total tag counts between the two samples (Figure S5 in Additional data file 1). While we await more available ChIP-Seq data with deeper coverage to understand and overcome this bias, we suggest to ChIP-Seq users that if they sequence more ChIP tags than controls, the FDR estimate of their ChIP peaks might be overly optimistic. Conclusion As developments in sequencing technology popularize ChIP-Seq, we propose a novel algorithm, MACS, for its data analysis. MACS offers four important utilities for predicting protein-DNA interaction sites from ChIP-Seq. First, MACS improves the spatial resolution of the predicted sites by empirically modeling the distance d and shifting tags by d/2. Second, MACS uses a dynamic λlocal parameter to capture local biases in the genome and improves the robustness and specificity of the prediction. It is worth noting that in addition to ChIP-Seq, λlocal can potentially be applied to other high throughput sequencing applications, such as copy number variation and digital gene expression, to capture regional biases and estimate robust fold-enrichment. Third, MACS can be applied to ChIP-Seq experiments without controls, and to those with controls with improved performance. Last but not least, MACS is easy to use and provides detailed information for each peak, such as genome coordinates, p-value, FDR, fold_enrichment, and summit (peak center). Materials and methods Dataset ChIP-Seq data for three factors, NRSF, CTCF, and FoxA1, were used in this study. ChIP-chip and ChIP-Seq (2.2 million ChIP and 2.8 million control uniquely mapped reads, simplified as 'tags') data for NRSF in Jurkat T cells were obtained from Gene Expression Omnibus (GSM210637) and Johnson et al. [8], respectively. ChIP-Seq (2.9 million ChIP tags) data for CTCF in CD4+ T cells were derived from Barski et al. [5]. ChIP-chip data for FoxA1 and controls in MCF7 cells were previously published [1], and their corresponding ChIP-Seq data were generated specifically for this study. Around 3 ng FoxA1 ChIP DNA and 3 ng control DNA were used for library preparation, each consisting of an equimolar mixture of DNA from three independent experiments. Libraries were prepared as described in [8] using a PCR preamplification step and size selection for DNA fragments between 150 and 400 bp. FoxA1 ChIP and control DNA were each sequenced with two lanes by the Illumina/Solexa 1G Genome Analyzer, and yielded 3.9 million and 5.2 million uniquely mapped tags, respectively. Software implementation MACS is implemented in Python and freely available with an open source Artistic License at [16]. It runs from the command line and takes the following parameters: -t for treatment file (ChIP tags, this is the ONLY required parameter for MACS) and -c for control file containing mapped tags; --format for input file format in BED or ELAND (output) format (default BED); --name for name of the run (for example, FoxA1, default NA); --gsize for mappable genome size to calculate λBG from tag count (default 2.7G bp, approximately the mappable human genome size); --tsize for tag size (default 25); --bw for bandwidth, which is half of the estimated sonication size (default 300); --pvalue for p-value cutoff to call peaks (default 1e-5); --mfold for high-confidence fold-enrichment to find model peaks for MACS modeling (default 32); --diag for generating the table to evaluate sequence saturation (default off). In addition, the user has the option to shift tags by an arbitrary number (--shiftsize) without the MACS model (--nomodel), to use a global lambda (--nolambda) to call peaks, and to show debugging and warning messages (--verbose). If a user has replicate files for ChIP or control, it is recommended to concatenate all replicates into one input file. The output includes one BED file containing the peak chromosome coordinates, and one xls file containing the genome coordinates, summit, p-value, fold_enrichment and FDR (if control is available) of each peak. For FoxA1 ChIP-Seq in MCF7 cells with 3.9 million and 5.2 million ChIP and control tags, respectively, it takes MACS 15 seconds to model the ChIP-DNA size distribution and less than 3 minutes to detect peaks on a 2 GHz CPU Linux computer with 2 GB of RAM. Figure S6 in Additional data file 1 illustrates the whole process with a flow chart. Abbreviations ChIP, chromatin immunoprecipitation; CTCF, CCCTC-binding factor; FDR, false discovery rate; FoxA1, hepatocyte nuclear factor 3α; MACS, Model-based Analysis of ChIP-Seq data; NRSF, neuron-restrictive silencer factor. Authors' contributions XSL, WL and YZ conceived the project and wrote the paper. YZ, TL and CAM designed the algorithm, performed the research and implemented the software. JE, DSJ, BEB, CN, RMM and MB performed FoxA1 ChIP-Seq experiments and contributed to ideas. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Additional data files The following additional data are available. Additional data file 1 contains supporting Figures S1-S6, and supporting Tables S1 and S2. Supplementary Material Additional data file 1 Figures S1-S6, and Tables S1 and S2. Click here for file
Genome-scale studies have revealed extensive, cell type-specific colocalization of transcription factors, but the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate in macrophages and B cells that collaborative interactions of the common factor PU.1 with small sets of macrophage- or B cell lineage-determining transcription factors establish cell-specific binding sites that are associated with the majority of promoter-distal H3K4me1-marked genomic regions. PU.1 binding initiates nucleosome remodeling, followed by H3K4 monomethylation at large numbers of genomic regions associated with both broadly and specifically expressed genes. These locations serve as beacons for additional factors, exemplified by liver X receptors, which drive both cell-specific gene expression and signal-dependent responses. Together with analyses of transcription factor binding and H3K4me1 patterns in other cell types, these studies suggest that simple combinations of lineage-determining transcription factors can specify the genomic sites ultimately responsible for both cell identity and cell type-specific responses to diverse signaling inputs. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
[1
]GRID grid.38142.3c, ISNI 000000041936754X, Department of Pediatric Oncology, , Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, ; Boston, MA 02115 USA
[2
]GRID grid.38142.3c, ISNI 000000041936754X, Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Boston Children’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer
Institute, , Harvard Medical School, ; Boston, MA 02115 USA
[3
]GRID grid.12955.3a, ISNI 0000 0001 2264 7233, State Key Laboratory of Cellular Stress Biology, Innovation Center for Cell Signaling
Network, School of Life Sciences, , Xiamen University, ; Xiamen, 361102 Fujian China
[4
]GRID grid.413575.1, ISNI 0000 0001 2167 1581, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, ; Boston, MA 02115 USA
[5
]GRID grid.59734.3c, ISNI 0000 0001 0670 2351, Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Charles Bronfman Institute for Precision
Medicine, , Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, ; New York, NY 10029 USA
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History
Date
received
: 11
June
2020
Date
accepted
: 2
September
2021
Funding
Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000009, Foundation for the National Institutes of Health;
Award ID: 5U54DK11805
Award ID: R01HG009663
Award Recipient
:
Guo-Cheng Yuan
Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001809, National Natural Science Foundation of China;
Award ID: 31871317
Award ID: 32070635
Award Recipient
:
Jialiang Huang
Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003392, Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province;
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