A User's Guide to the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE)
Figure 6
Incremental discovery of transcribed elements and regulatory DNA.
(A) Robustness of gene expression quantification relative to sequencing depth. PolyA-selected RNA from H1 human embryonic stem cells was sequenced to 214 million mapped reads. The number of reads (indicated on the x-axis) was sampled from the total, and gene expression (in FPKM) was calculated and compared to the gene expression values resulting from all the reads (final values). Gene expression levels were split into four abundance classes and the fraction of genes in each class with RPKM values within 10% of the final values was calculated. At ∼80 million mapped reads, more than 80% of the low abundance class of genes is robustly quantified according to this measure (horizontal dotted line). Abundances for the classes in RPKM are given in the inset box. (B) Effect of number of reads on fractions of peaks called in ChIP-seq. ChIP-seq experiments for three sequence-specific transcription factors were sequenced to a depth of 50 million aligned reads. To evaluate the effect of read depth on the number of binding sites identified, peaks were called with the MACS algorithm at various read depths, and the fraction of the total number of peaks that were identified at each read depth are shown. For sequence-specific transcription factors that have strong signal with ChIP-seq, such as GABP, approximately 24 million reads (dashed vertical line) are sufficient to capture 90% of the binding sites. However, for more general sequence-specific factors (e.g., OCT2), additional sequencing continues to yield additional binding site information. RNA Pol2, which interacts with DNA broadly across genes, maintains a nearly linear gain in binding information through 50 million aligned reads. (C) Saturation analysis of ENCODE DNaseI hypersensitivity data with increasing numbers of cell lines. The plot shows the extent of saturation of DNaseI hypersensitivity sites (DHSs) discovered as increasing numbers of cell lines are studied. The plot is generated from the ENCODE DNaseI elements defined at the end of January 2010 (from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg18/encodeDCC) as follows. We first define a set of DHSs from the overlap of all DHS data across all cell lines. Where overlapping elements are identified in two or more cell lines, these are determined to represent the same element and fused up to a maximum size of 5 kb. Elements above this limit are split and counted as distinct. We then calculate the subset of these elements represented by each single cell line experiment. The distribution of element counts for each single cell line is plotted as a box plot with the median at position 1 on the x-axis. We next calculate the element contributions of all possible pairs of cell line experiments and plot this distribution at position 2. We continue to do this for all incremental steps up to and including all cell lines (which is by definition only a single data point). (D) Saturation of TF ChIP-seq elements in K562 cells. This plot illustrates the saturation of elements identified by TF ChIP-seq as additional factors are analyzed within the same cell line. The plot is generated by the equivalent approach as described in (C), except the data are now the set of all elements defined by ChIP-seq analysis of K562 cells with 42 different transcription factors. The data were from the January 2010 data freeze from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg18/encodeDCC. For consistency, the peak calls from all ChIP-seq data were generated by a uniform processing pipeline with the Peakseq peak caller and IDR replicate reconciliation.