Abstract
Motivation: The packaging of DNA around nucleosomes in eukaryotic cells plays a crucial role in regulation of gene expression, and other DNA-related processes. To better understand the regulatory role of nucleosomes, it is important to pinpoint their position in a high (5-10 bp) resolution. Toward this end, several recent works used dense tiling arrays to map nucleosomes in a high-throughput manner. These data were then parsed and hand-curated, and the positions of nucleosomes were assessed. Results: In this manuscript, we present a fully automated algorithm to analyze such data and predict the exact location of nucleosomes. We introduce a method, based on a probabilistic graphical model, to increase the resolution of our predictions even beyond that of the microarray used. We show how to build such a model and how to compile it into a simple Hidden Markov Model, allowing for a fast and accurate inference of nucleosome positions. We applied our model to nucleosomal data from mid-log yeast cells reported by Yuan et al. and compared our predictions to those of the original paper; to a more recent method that uses five times denser tiling arrays as explained by Lee et al.; and to a curated set of literature-based nucleosome positions. Our results suggest that by applying our algorithm to the same data used by Yuan et al. our fully automated model traced 13% more nucleosomes, and increased the overall accuracy by about 20%. We believe that such an improvement opens the way for a better understanding of the regulatory mechanisms controlling gene expression, and how they are encoded in the DNA.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | i139-i146 |
Journal | Bioinformatics |
Volume | 24 |
Issue number | 13 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2008 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Oliver Rando and Guo-Cheng Yuan for help with accessing nucleosome calls data. We thank Ofer Meshi, Naomi Habib, Hanah Margalit, and Ilan Wapinski for comments and discussions. This work was supported in part by grants from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).