Statistical modeling of long-range chromatin interactions on gene regulation and underlying molecular

疾病相关的遗传变异已被发现在基因表达的调控基因组区域富集。为了详细了解疾病机制，一个核心问题是系统地描述组织特异性基因表达程序是如何被调节的。增强子是一类具有复杂特征的调控元件，在人类基因组中大量存在。增强子对基因表达的调控具有高度的组织特异性，与组合转录因子结合相关，并参与远距离三维染色质相互作用。因此，描述大规模增强子监管网络的特征具有挑战性。该项目的主要目标是开发一套概率模型和高效的机器学习算法，以预测不同细胞背景下全基因组增强子调控网络和相关的分子机制，以建立远程相互作用，这将被用来解释疾病相关的遗传变异。在Aim 1中，将开发新的综合图形模型来预测将组织特异性增强子与其远端靶基因连接起来的远程染色质相互作用，以及组合转录因子结合模式。在Aim 2中，将设计计算算法来询问如何建立特定的染色质相互作用，从而获得染色质形成的机制见解。在目标3中，将开发统计模型，将增强基因调控网络与遗传学数据相结合，以预测哪些非编码变异可能破坏调控链接并导致疾病，从而提高统计能力和准确性。该建模框架将大大扩展对非编码变异和人类疾病机制的分析能力。这三个目标的计算预测将在乳腺癌发展的小鼠模型中进行实验测试。该项目将为远程增强子调控及其在人类疾病中的功能作用提供创新的计算工具和系统的生物学见解。

Disease-associated genetic variants have been found to be enriched in regulatory genomic regions of gene expression. In order to gain detailed understanding of disease mechanisms, one central question is to systematically delineate how tissue-specific gene expression programs are regulated. Enhancers are a major family of regulatory elements with complex signatures and they are abundant in the human genome. Enhancer regulation of gene expression is highly tissue-specific, associated with combinatorial transcription factor binding, and involved with long-range three-dimensional chromatin interactions. It is therefore challenging to characterize the large-scale enhancer regulatory networks. The primary goal of this project is to develop a suite of probabilistic models and efficient machine learning algorithms to predict genome-wide enhancer regulatory networks in diverse panels of cellular contexts and the associated molecular mechanisms to establish long-range interactions, which will be leveraged to interpret disease-associated genetic variants. In Aim 1, novel integrative graphical models will be developed to predict long-range chromatin interactions linking tissue-specific enhancers to their distal target genes, along with combinatorial transcription factor binding patterns. In Aim 2, computational algorithms will be designed to interrogate how specific chromatin interactions are established, leading to mechanistic insights on chromatin formation. In Aim 3, statistical models will be developed to integrate enhancer-gene regulatory networks with genetics data to predict which non-coding variants may disrupt regulatory links and cause diseases, with improved statistical power and accuracy. This modeling framework will substantially expand the analytical ability on non-coding variants and human disease mechanisms. Computational predictions from the three aims will be experimentally tested in mouse models of breast cancer development. This project will lead to both innovative computational tools and systematic biological insights on long-range enhancer regulation and their functional roles in human diseases.