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Controls of nucleosome positioning in the human genome.

Daniel J Gaffney | Graham McVicker | Athma A Pai | Yvonne N Fondufe-Mittendorf | Noah Lewellen | Katelyn Michelini | Jonathan Widom | Yoav Gilad | Jonathan K Pritchard
PLoS genetics | 2012

Nucleosomes are important for gene regulation because their arrangement on the genome can control which proteins bind to DNA. Currently, few human nucleosomes are thought to be consistently positioned across cells; however, this has been difficult to assess due to the limited resolution of existing data. We performed paired-end sequencing of micrococcal nuclease-digested chromatin (MNase-seq) from seven lymphoblastoid cell lines and mapped over 3.6 billion MNase-seq fragments to the human genome to create the highest-resolution map of nucleosome occupancy to date in a human cell type. In contrast to previous results, we find that most nucleosomes have more consistent positioning than expected by chance and a substantial fraction (8.7%) of nucleosomes have moderate to strong positioning. In aggregate, nucleosome sequences have 10 bp periodic patterns in dinucleotide frequency and DNase I sensitivity; and, across cells, nucleosomes frequently have translational offsets that are multiples of 10 bp. We estimate that almost half of the genome contains regularly spaced arrays of nucleosomes, which are enriched in active chromatin domains. Single nucleotide polymorphisms that reduce DNase I sensitivity can disrupt the phasing of nucleosome arrays, which indicates that they often result from positioning against a barrier formed by other proteins. However, nucleosome arrays can also be created by DNA sequence alone. The most striking example is an array of over 400 nucleosomes on chromosome 12 that is created by tandem repetition of sequences with strong positioning properties. In summary, a large fraction of nucleosomes are consistently positioned--in some regions because they adopt favored sequence positions, and in other regions because they are forced into specific arrangements by chromatin remodeling or DNA binding proteins.

Pubmed ID: 23166509

Research resources used in this publication

None found

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Associated grants

  • Agency: NHGRI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: HG006123
  • Agency: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
  • Agency: NIMH NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 MH090951
  • Agency: NIMH NIH HHS, United States
    Id: MH090951
  • Agency: NHGRI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 HG006123

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1000 Genomes Project and AWS (tool)

RRID:SCR_008801

A dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals, freely available for research use. The 1000 Genomes Project is an international research effort coordinated by a consortium of 75 companies and organizations to establish the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation. The project has grown to 200 terabytes of genomic data including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals that researchers can now access on AWS for use in disease research free of charge. The dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals is now available to all via Amazon S3. The data can be found at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/1000genomes The 1000 Genomes Project aims to include the genomes of more than 2,662 individuals from 26 populations around the world, and the NIH will continue to add the remaining genome samples to the data collection this year. Public Data Sets on AWS provide a centralized repository of public data hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The data can be seamlessly accessed from AWS services such Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), which provide organizations with the highly scalable compute resources needed to take advantage of these large data collections. AWS is storing the public data sets at no charge to the community. Researchers pay only for the additional AWS resources they need for further processing or analysis of the data. All 200 TB of the latest 1000 Genomes Project data is available in a publicly available Amazon S3 bucket. You can access the data via simple HTTP requests, or take advantage of the AWS SDKs in languages such as Ruby, Java, Python, .NET and PHP. Researchers can use the Amazon EC2 utility computing service to dive into this data without the usual capital investment required to work with data at this scale. AWS also provides a number of orchestration and automation services to help teams make their research available to others to remix and reuse. Making the data available via a bucket in Amazon S3 also means that customers can crunch the information using Hadoop via Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and take advantage of the growing collection of tools for running bioinformatics job flows, such as CloudBurst and Crossbow.

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