Abstract
Histone modifications are important epigenetic regulators and play a critical role in development. The targeting mechanism for histone modifications is complex and still incompletely understood. Here we applied a computational approach to predict genome-scale histone modification targets in humans by the genomic DNA sequences using a set of recent ChIP-seq data. We found that a number of histone modification marks could be predicted with high accuracy. On the other hand, the impact of DNA sequences for each mark is intrinsically different dependent upon the target- and tissue-specificity. Diverse patterns are associated with different repetitive elements. Unexpectedly, we found that non-overlapping, functionally opposite histone modification marks could share similar sequence features. We propose that these marks may target a common set of loci but are mutually exclusive and that the competition may be important for developmental control. Taken together, we show that our computational approach has provided new insights into the targeting mechanism of histone modifications.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
