Project description:Mapping of nucleosomes, the basic DNA packaging unit in eukaryotes, is fundamental for understanding genome regulation as nucleosomes modulate DNA access by their positioning along the genome. A cell population nucleosome map requires two observables: nucleosome positions along the DNA (“Where?”) and nucleosome occupancies across the population (“In how many cells?”). All available genome-wide nucleosome mapping techniques are yield methods as they score either nucleosomal (e.g., MNase-seq, chemical cleavage-seq) or non-nucleosomal (e.g., ATAC-seq) DNA but lose track of the total DNA population for each genomic region. Therefore, they only provide nucleosome positions and maybe compare relative occupancies between positions but cannot measure absolute nucleosome occupancy, which is the fraction of all DNA molecules occupied at a given position and time by a nucleosome. Here, we established two orthogonal and thereby crossvalidating approaches to measure absolute nucleosome occupancy across the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome via restriction enzymes and DNA methyltransferases. The resulting high-resolution (9 bp) map shows uniform absolute occupancies. Most nucleosome positions are occupied in most cells: 97% of all nucleosomes called by chemical cleavage-seq have a mean absolute occupancy of 90 ± 6% (± SD). Depending on nucleosome position calling procedures, there are 57-60,000 nucleosomes per yeast cell. The few low absolute occupancy nucleosomes do not correlate with highly transcribed gene bodies, but with increased presence of the nucleosome-evicting RSC chromatin remodeling complex there and are enriched upstream of highly transcribed or regulated genes. Our work provides a quantitative method and reference frame in absolute terms for future chromatin studies.
Project description:Mapping of nucleosomes, the basic DNA packaging unit in eukaryotes, is fundamental for understanding genome regulation as nucleosomes modulate DNA access by their positioning along the genome. A cell population nucleosome map requires two observables: nucleosome positions along the DNA (“Where?”) and nucleosome occupancies across the population (“In how many cells?”). All available genome-wide nucleosome mapping techniques are yield methods as they score either nucleosomal (e.g., MNase-seq, chemical cleavage-seq) or non-nucleosomal (e.g., ATAC-seq) DNA but lose track of the total DNA population for each genomic region. Therefore, they only provide nucleosome positions and maybe compare relative occupancies between positions but cannot measure absolute nucleosome occupancy, which is the fraction of all DNA molecules occupied at a given position and time by a nucleosome. Here, we established two orthogonal and thereby crossvalidating approaches to measure absolute nucleosome occupancy across the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome via restriction enzymes and DNA methyltransferases. The resulting high-resolution (9 bp) map shows uniform absolute occupancies. Most nucleosome positions are occupied in most cells: 97% of all nucleosomes called by chemical cleavage-seq have a mean absolute occupancy of 90 ± 6% (± SD). Depending on nucleosome position calling procedures, there are 57-60,000 nucleosomes per yeast cell. The few low absolute occupancy nucleosomes do not correlate with highly transcribed gene bodies, but with increased presence of the nucleosome-evicting RSC chromatin remodeling complex there and are enriched upstream of highly transcribed or regulated genes. Our work provides a quantitative method and reference frame in absolute terms for future chromatin studies.
Project description:Mapping of nucleosomes, the basic DNA packaging unit in eukaryotes, is fundamental for understanding genome regulation as nucleosomes modulate DNA access by their positioning along the genome. A cell population nucleosome map requires two observables: nucleosome positions along the DNA (“Where?”) and nucleosome occupancies across the population (“In how many cells?”). All available genome-wide nucleosome mapping techniques are yield methods as they score either nucleosomal (e.g., MNase-seq, chemical cleavage-seq) or non-nucleosomal (e.g., ATAC-seq) DNA but lose track of the total DNA population for each genomic region. Therefore, they only provide nucleosome positions and maybe compare relative occupancies between positions but cannot measure absolute nucleosome occupancy, which is the fraction of all DNA molecules occupied at a given position and time by a nucleosome. Here, we established two orthogonal and thereby crossvalidating approaches to measure absolute nucleosome occupancy across the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome via restriction enzymes and DNA methyltransferases. The resulting high-resolution (9 bp) map shows uniform absolute occupancies. Most nucleosome positions are occupied in most cells: 97% of all nucleosomes called by chemical cleavage-seq have a mean absolute occupancy of 90 ± 6% (± SD). Depending on nucleosome position calling procedures, there are 57-60,000 nucleosomes per yeast cell. The few low absolute occupancy nucleosomes do not correlate with highly transcribed gene bodies, but with increased presence of the nucleosome-evicting RSC chromatin remodeling complex there and are enriched upstream of highly transcribed or regulated genes. Our work provides a quantitative method and reference frame in absolute terms for future chromatin studies.
Project description:Mapping of nucleosomes, the basic DNA packaging unit in eukaryotes, is fundamental for understanding genome regulation as nucleosomes modulate DNA access by their positioning along the genome. A cell population nucleosome map requires two observables: nucleosome positions along the DNA (“Where?”) and nucleosome occupancies across the population (“In how many cells?”). All available genome-wide nucleosome mapping techniques are yield methods as they score either nucleosomal (e.g., MNase-seq, chemical cleavage-seq) or non-nucleosomal (e.g., ATAC-seq) DNA but lose track of the total DNA population for each genomic region. Therefore, they only provide nucleosome positions and maybe compare relative occupancies between positions but cannot measure absolute nucleosome occupancy, which is the fraction of all DNA molecules occupied at a given position and time by a nucleosome. Here, we established two orthogonal and thereby crossvalidating approaches to measure absolute nucleosome occupancy across the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome via restriction enzymes and DNA methyltransferases. The resulting high-resolution (9 bp) map shows uniform absolute occupancies. Most nucleosome positions are occupied in most cells: 97% of all nucleosomes called by chemical cleavage-seq have a mean absolute occupancy of 90 ± 6% (± SD). Depending on nucleosome position calling procedures, there are 57-60,000 nucleosomes per yeast cell. The few low absolute occupancy nucleosomes do not correlate with highly transcribed gene bodies, but with increased presence of the nucleosome-evicting RSC chromatin remodeling complex there and are enriched upstream of highly transcribed or regulated genes. Our work provides a quantitative method and reference frame in absolute terms for future chromatin studies.
Project description:Chromatin mapping using micrococcal nuclease (MNase) has been the standard tool for mapping nucleosomes for >40 years. When coupled with DNA sequencing, MNase-seq can provide base-pair-resolution nucleosome maps. However, determining nucleosome occupancy using MNase-seq has been hampered by its aggressive endo-/exo-nuclease activities, whereby cleavages within linker regions produce oligo- and mono-nucleosomes whereas cleavages within nucleosomes destroy them. Here we introduce a theoretical framework for predicting nucleosome occupancies and an experimental protocol with appropriate spike-in normalization that confirms our theory and provides accurate occupancy levels over an MNase digestion time-course. As expected, DNaseI hypersensitive sites and transcription units are digested by MNase at elevated rates, and the apparent deficiency of nucleosomes at 3’ ends of Drosophila genes is an artifact of MNase preference for AT-rich DNA. Surprisingly, we observed no overall differences between Drosophila euchromatin and heterochromatin, which implies that heterochromatin compaction does not render nucleosomal DNA less accessible than euchromatin.