Project description:Background Nucleosome repositioning in cancer is believed to cause many changes in genome organisation and gene expression. Understanding these changes is important to elucidate fundamental aspects of cancer. It is also important for medical diagnostics based on cell-free DNA (cfDNA), which originates from genomic DNA regions protected from digestion by nucleosomes. Results We have generated high-resolution nucleosome maps in paired tumour and normal tissues from the same breast cancer patients using MNase-assisted histone H3 ChIP-seq and compared them with the corresponding cfDNA from blood plasma. This analysis has detected single-nucleosome repositioning at key regulatory regions in a patient-specific manner and common cancer-specific patterns across patients. The nucleosomes gained in tumour versus normal tissue were particularly informative of cancer pathways, with ~ 20-fold enrichment at CpG islands, a large fraction of which marked promoters of genes encoding DNA-binding proteins. The tumour tissues were characterised by a 5–10 bp decrease in the average distance between nucleosomes (nucleosome repeat length, NRL), which is qualitatively similar to the differences between pluripotent and differentiated cells. This effect was correlated with gene activity, differential DNA methylation and changes in local occupancy of linker histone variants H1.4 and H1X. Conclusions Our study offers a novel resource of high-resolution nucleosome maps in breast cancer patients and reports for the first time the effect of systematic decrease of NRL in paired tumour versus normal breast tissues from the same patient. Our findings provide a new mechanistic understanding of nucleosome repositioning in tumour tissues that can be valuable for patient diagnostics, stratification and monitoring.
Project description:Previous studies have analyzed patterns of transcription, transcription factor (TF) binding or mapped nucleosome occupancy across the genome. These suggest that the three aspects are genetically connected but the cause and effect relationships are still unknown. For example, physiologic TF binding studies involve many TFs, consequently, it is difficult to assign nucleosome reorganization to the binding site occupancy of any particular TF. Therefore, several aspects remain unclear: does TF binding influence nucleosome (re)organizations locally (in close vicinity of their binding sites) or impact the chromatin landscape at a more global level; are all or only a fraction of TF binding a result of reorganization in nucleosome occupancy; finally, do all TF binding and associated nucleosome occupancy changes result in altered gene expression? With these in mind, we sought to study a single TF that induces physiological changes, and following characterization of the two states (before and after induction of the TF) we determined: (a) genomic binding sites of the TF, (b) promoter nucleosome occupancy and (c) transcriptome profiles, independently in both conditions. Results demonstrate that TF binding influences expression of the target gene only when it is coupled to nucleosome repositioning at or close to its binding site, and not when transcription factor binding occurs without local associated nucleosome reorganization.
Project description:Nucleosomes are the basic unit of chromatin. Nucleosome positioning (NP) plays a key role in transcriptional regulation and other biological processes. To better understand NP we used MNase-seq to investigate changes that occur as human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) transition to nascent mesoderm and then to smooth muscle cells (SMCs). Compared to differentiated cell derivatives, nucleosome occupancy at promoters and other notable genic sites, such as exon/intron junctions and adjacent regions, in hESCs shows a stronger correlation with transcript abundance and is less influenced by sequence content. Upon hESC differentiation, genes being silenced, but not genes being activated, display a substantial change in nucleosome occupancy at their promoters. Genome-wide, we detected a shift of NP to regions of higher G+C content as hESCs differentiate to SMCs. Notably, genomic regions with higher nucleosome occupancy harbor twice as many G↔C changes but fewer than half A↔T changes, compared to regions with lower nucleosome occupancy. Finally, our analysis indicates that the hESC genome is not rearranged and has a sequence mutation rate resembling normal human genomes. Our study reveals another unique feature of hESC chromatin, and sheds light on the relationship between nucleosome occupancy and sequence G+C content.
Project description:We describe the genome-wide nucleosome profiles of four related yeast species. All species display the same global organization features first described in S. cerevisiae: a stereotypical nucleosome organization along genes, and the classification of promoters into these which contain or lack a pronounced Nucleosome Depleted region (NDR), with the latter displaying a more dynamic pattern of gene expression. This global similarity, however, does not reflect a static evolutionary pattern, as nucleosome positioning at specific genes diverged rapidly leaving practically no similarity between S. cerevisiae and C. glabrata orthologs (~50 Myr). We show that this rapid divergence in nucleosome positioning contrasts a conserved pattern of gene expression, consistent with the idea that divergence of nucleosome patterns has a limited effect on gene expression as many different configurations can support the same regulatory outcome. Nucleosomes from 4 different yeast species were isolated and sequenced using the Illumina GAII platform. Replicates were performed for 3 of the species
Project description:To measure nucleosome positions on a genomic scale, we developed a high-throughput DNA microarray method to identify nucleosomal and linker DNA sequences based on susceptibility of linker DNA to micrococcal nuclease. Nucleosomal DNA was isolated and labeled with Cy3 fluorescent dye (green), and mixed with Cy5-labeled total genomic DNA (red). This mixture was hybridized to microarrays printed with overlapping 50mer oligonucleotide probes tiled across chromosomal regions of interest. Keywords = nucleosome Keywords = yeast Keywords = tiling microrray Keywords: repeat sample
Project description:We describe the genome-wide nucleosome profiles of four related yeast species. All species display the same global organization features first described in S. cerevisiae: a stereotypical nucleosome organization along genes, and the classification of promoters into these which contain or lack a pronounced Nucleosome Depleted region (NDR), with the latter displaying a more dynamic pattern of gene expression. This global similarity, however, does not reflect a static evolutionary pattern, as nucleosome positioning at specific genes diverged rapidly leaving practically no similarity between S. cerevisiae and C. glabrata orthologs (~50 Myr). We show that this rapid divergence in nucleosome positioning contrasts a conserved pattern of gene expression, consistent with the idea that divergence of nucleosome patterns has a limited effect on gene expression as many different configurations can support the same regulatory outcome.
Project description:We report nucleosome poisitioning under pertubation conditions such as heat shock, CHD1 deletion, and SET2 deletion Mono-nucleosome DNA was prepared from wild type strain under normal or heat shock conditions, or CHD1 or SET2 deletion strain. The mono-nucleosome DNA was mapped.