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Uncoupling evolutionary changes in DNA sequence, transcription factor occupancy and enhancer activity.

ABSTRACT: Sequence variation within enhancers plays a major role in both evolution and disease, yet its functional impact on transcription factor (TF) occupancy and enhancer activity remains poorly understood. Here, we assayed the binding of five essential TFs over multiple stages of embryogenesis in two distant Drosophila species (with 1.4 substitutions per neutral site), identifying thousands of orthologous enhancers with conserved or diverged combinatorial occupancy. We used these binding signatures to dissect two properties of developmental enhancers: (1) potential TF cooperativity, using signatures of co-associations and co-divergence in TF occupancy. This revealed conserved combinatorial binding despite sequence divergence, suggesting protein-protein interactions sustain conserved collective occupancy. (2) Enhancer in-vivo activity, revealing orthologous enhancers with conserved activity despite divergence in TF occupancy. Taken together, we identify enhancers with diverged motifs yet conserved occupancy and others with diverged occupancy yet conserved activity, emphasising the need to functionally measure the effect of divergence on enhancer activity.

SUBMITTER: Khoueiry P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5550276 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Uncoupling evolutionary changes in DNA sequence, transcription factor occupancy and enhancer activity.

Khoueiry Pierre P Girardot Charles C Ciglar Lucia L Peng Pei-Chen PC Gustafson E Hilary EH Sinha Saurabh S Furlong Eileen Em EE

eLife 20170809

Sequence variation within enhancers plays a major role in both evolution and disease, yet its functional impact on transcription factor (TF) occupancy and enhancer activity remains poorly understood. Here, we assayed the binding of five essential TFs over multiple stages of embryogenesis in two distant <i>Drosophila</i> species (with 1.4 substitutions per neutral site), identifying thousands of orthologous enhancers with conserved or diverged combinatorial occupancy. We used these binding signat ...[more]

PMID: 28792889

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Project description:Understanding the mechanisms by which transcription factors (TF) are recruited to their physiological target sites is crucial for understanding gene regulation. DNA sequence intrinsic features such as predicted binding affinity are often not very effective in predicting in vivo site occupancy and in any case could not explain cell-type specific binding events. Recent reports show that chromatin accessibility, nucleosome occupancy and specific histone post-translational modifications greatly influence TF site occupancy in vivo. In this work, we use machine-learning methods to build predictive models and assess the relative importance of different sequence-intrinsic and chromatin features in the TF-to-target-site recruitment process.Our study primarily relies on recent data published by the ENCODE consortium. Five dissimilar TFs assayed in multiple cell-types were selected as examples: CTCF, JunD, REST, GABP and USF2. We used two types of candidate target sites: (a) predicted sites obtained by scanning the whole genome with a position weight matrix, and (b) cell-type specific peak lists provided by ENCODE. Quantitative in vivo occupancy levels in different cell-types were based on ChIP-seq data for the corresponding TFs. In parallel, we computed a number of associated sequence-intrinsic and experimental features (histone modification, DNase I hypersensitivity, etc.) for each site. Machine learning algorithms were then used in a binary classification and regression framework to predict site occupancy and binding strength, for the purpose of assessing the relative importance of different contextual features.We observed striking differences in the feature importance rankings between the five factors tested. PWM-scores were amongst the most important features only for CTCF and REST but of little value for JunD and USF2. Chromatin accessibility and active histone marks are potent predictors for all factors except REST. Structural DNA parameters, repressive and gene body associated histone marks are generally of little or no predictive value.We define a general and extensible computational framework for analyzing the importance of various DNA-intrinsic and chromatin-associated features in determining cell-type specific TF binding to target sites. The application of our methodology to ENCODE data has led to new insights on transcription regulatory processes and may serve as example for future studies encompassing even larger datasets.

Project description:ChIP-based genome-wide assays of transcription factor (TF) occupancy have emerged as a powerful, high-throughput method to understand transcriptional regulation, especially on a global scale. This has led to great interest in the underlying biochemical mechanisms that direct TF-DNA binding, with the ultimate goal of computationally predicting a TF's occupancy profile in any cellular condition. In this study, we examined the influence of various potential determinants of TF-DNA binding on a much larger scale than previously undertaken. We used a thermodynamics-based model of TF-DNA binding, called "STAP," to analyze 45 TF-ChIP data sets from Drosophila embryonic development. We built a cross-validation framework that compares a baseline model, based on the ChIP'ed ("primary") TF's motif, to more complex models where binding by secondary TFs is hypothesized to influence the primary TF's occupancy. Candidates interacting TFs were chosen based on RNA-SEQ expression data from the time point of the ChIP experiment. We found widespread evidence of both cooperative and antagonistic effects by secondary TFs, and explicitly quantified these effects. We were able to identify multiple classes of interactions, including (1) long-range interactions between primary and secondary motifs (separated by ?150 bp), suggestive of indirect effects such as chromatin remodeling, (2) short-range interactions with specific inter-site spacing biases, suggestive of direct physical interactions, and (3) overlapping binding sites suggesting competitive binding. Furthermore, by factoring out the previously reported strong correlation between TF occupancy and DNA accessibility, we were able to categorize the effects into those that are likely to be mediated by the secondary TF's effect on local accessibility and those that utilize accessibility-independent mechanisms. Finally, we conducted in vitro pull-down assays to test model-based predictions of short-range cooperative interactions, and found that seven of the eight TF pairs tested physically interact and that some of these interactions mediate cooperative binding to DNA.

Dataset Information

Uncoupling evolutionary changes in DNA sequence, transcription factor occupancy and enhancer activity.

Publications

Uncoupling evolutionary changes in DNA sequence, transcription factor occupancy and enhancer activity.

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