Genome-wide discovery of active regulatory elements and transcription factor footprints in Caenorhabditis elegans using DNase-seq
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ABSTRACT: Deep sequencing of size-selected DNaseI-treated chromatin (DNase-seq) allows high resolution measurement of chromatin accessibility to DNaseI cleavage, permitting identification of de novo active cis regulatory modules (CRMs) and individual transcription factor (TF) binding sites. We adapted DNase-seq to nuclei isolated from C. elegans embryos and L1 arrest larvae to generate high-resolution maps of TF binding. Over half of embryonic DNaseI hypersensitive sites (DHS) were annotated in noncoding sequences, with 23% in intergenic, 11% promoter regions and 21% in introns, with similar statistics in data collected from L1 arrest larvae. Noncoding DHS exhibit high evolutionary sequence conservation and are enriched in marks of enhancer activity and transcription. We validated noncoding DHS against a previously investigated set of enhancers from myo-2, myo-3, hlh-1, elt-2 and lin-26/lir-1 gene loci and recapitulated 15 of 17 known enhancers in these loci. We then mined the DNase-seq data to identify putative active CRMs and TF footprints. Our DNase-seq data could also be used to improve predictions of tissue-specific expression compared to motifs alone. In a pilot functional test, 10 of 15 DHS from pha-4, icl-1 and ceh-13 drove reporter gene expression in transgenic C. elegans. Overall, we provide experimental annotation of 26,644 putative CRMs in the embryo containing 55,890 TF footprints, and 15,841 putative CRMs in the L1 arrest larvae containing 32,685 TF footprints.
ORGANISM(S): Caenorhabditis elegans
PROVIDER: GSE97425 | GEO | 2017/08/01
SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA381766
REPOSITORIES: GEO
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