Differential DNase I hypersensitivity reveals factor-dependent chromatin dynamics

  1. X. Shirley Liu1,3,6
  1. 1Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
  2. 2Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA;
  3. 3Center for Functional Cancer Epigenetics, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA;
  4. 4Department of Oncology, Lombardi Cancer Center, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20057, USA
    1. 5 These authors contributed equally to this work.

    Abstract

    Transcription factor cistromes are highly cell-type specific. Chromatin accessibility, histone modifications, and nucleosome occupancy have all been found to play a role in defining these binding locations. Here, we show that hormone-induced DNase I hypersensitivity changes (ΔDHS) are highly predictive of androgen receptor (AR) and estrogen receptor 1 (ESR1) binding in prostate cancer and breast cancer cells, respectively. While chromatin structure prior to receptor binding and nucleosome occupancy after binding are strikingly different for ESR1 and AR, ΔDHS is highly predictive for both. AR binding is associated with changes in both local nucleosome occupancy and DNase I hypersensitivity. In contrast, while global ESR1 binding is unrelated to changes in nucleosome occupancy, DNase I hypersensitivity dynamics are also predictive of the ESR1 cistrome. These findings suggest that AR and ESR1 have distinct modes of interaction with chromatin and that DNase I hypersensitivity dynamics provides a general approach for predicting cell-type specific cistromes.

    Footnotes

    • 6 Corresponding authors.

      E-mail myles_brown{at}dfci.harvard.edu.

      E-mail xsliu{at}jimmy.harvard.edu.

    • [Supplemental material is available for this article.]

    • Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.133280.111.

    • Received October 12, 2011.
    • Accepted March 6, 2012.

    This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

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