High-throughput Discovery of Novel Genome Organization Regulators

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ABSTRACT CTCF binding at its convergent-orientated DNA motifs has been implicated in establishing TAD boundary. CTCF protein regulates the genome organization through cohesin complex-mediated loop extrusion mechanism. While a few more factors have been recently discovered to regulate genome organization, such as NIPBL, WAPL, YY1, ZNF143, and MAZ, it is still far from a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of how the genome is organized. Discovering novel regulators of genome organization is still challenging due to the intensive nature of chromatin conformation capture technologies. To address the technical challenge in measuring genome organization, we have recently demonstrated that a deep neural network approach can enable de novo prediction of cell type- specific chromatin organization at high resolution. Moreover, this deep neural network model enables high- throughput in silico genetic screen (ISGS) for identifying cell type-specific DNA elements that are important for chromatin interactions. To fully unlock the discovery potential of this deep neural network-based ISGS approach, here we propose to leverage the NIH Common Fund-supported large-scale genomic data across human bio- samples for discovering novel regulators in 3D genome organization. We will predict a list of high-confidence trans-acting regulators, and experimentally validate 3-5 top hits in pilot studies to generate cross-cutting hypotheses for future research in 3D genome regulation.