Chromatin regulation underlies a variety of DNA metabolism processes, including transcription, recombination, repair, and replication. To perform a quantitative genetic analysis of chromatin accessibility, we obtained open chromatin profiles across 96 genetically different yeast strains by FAIRE (formaldehyde-assisted isolation of regulatory elements) assay followed by sequencing. While 5∼10% of open chromatin region (OCRs) were significantly affected by variations in their underlying DNA sequences, subtelomeric areas as well as gene-rich and gene-poor regions displayed high levels of sequence-independent variation. We performed quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping using the FAIRE signal for each OCR as a quantitative trait. While individual OCRs were associated with a handful of specific genetic markers, gene expression levels were associated with many regulatory loci. We found multi-target trans-loci responsible for a very large number of OCRs, which seemed to reflect the widespread influence of certain chromatin regulators. Such regulatory hotspots were enriched for known regulatory functions, such as recombinational DNA repair, telomere replication, and general transcription control. The OCRs associated with these multi-target trans-loci coincided with recombination hotspots, telomeres, and gene-rich regions according to the function of the associated regulators. Our findings provide a global quantitative picture of the genetic architecture of chromatin regulation.
Pubmed ID: 23408895 RIS Download
Publication data is provided by the National Library of Medicine ® and PubMed ®. Data is retrieved from PubMed ® on a weekly schedule. For terms and conditions see the National Library of Medicine Terms and Conditions.
A portal to biomedical and genomic information. NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease.
View all literature mentionsA software package that generates a continuous tag sequence density estimation allowing identification of biologically meaningful sites whose output can be displayed directly in the UCSC Genome Browser.
View all literature mentionsSoftware tools for Motif Discovery and next-gen sequencing analysis. Used for analyzing ChIP-Seq, GRO-Seq, RNA-Seq, DNase-Seq, Hi-C and numerous other types of functional genomics sequencing data sets. Collection of command line programs for unix style operating systems written in Perl and C++.
View all literature mentions