Abstract
4C methods are useful to investigate dependencies between regulatory mechanisms and chromatin structures by revealing the frequency of chromatin contacts between a locus of interest and remote sequences on the chromosome. In this chapter we describe a protocol for the data analysis of microarray-based 4C experiments, presenting updated versions of the methods we used in a previous study of the large-scale chromatin interaction profile of a Polycomb response element in Drosophila. The protocol covers data preparation, normalization, microarray probe selection, and the multi-resolution detection of regions with enriched chromatin contacts. A reanalysis of two independent mouse datasets illustrates the versatility of this protocol and the importance of data processing in 4C. Methods were implemented in the R package MRA.TA (Multi-Resolution Analyses on Tiling Array data), and they can be used to analyze ChIP-on-chip data on broadly distributed chromatin components such as histone marks.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Elzo de Wit and Bas Tolhuis for their help sharing source code and biological data, and Tom Sexton for feedback and discussions. B.L. was supported by the Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche and the European Research Council (ERC-2008-AdG No 232947), I.C. was supported by the Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche and by the Ligue contre le Cancer. F.B. and G.C. are supported by the CNRS. G.C. research was supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC-2008-AdG No 232947), the CNRS, the European Network of Excellence EpiGeneSys, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, and the Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer.
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Leblanc, B., Comet, I., Bantignies, F., Cavalli, G. (2016). Chromosome Conformation Capture on Chip (4C): Data Processing. In: Lanzuolo, C., Bodega, B. (eds) Polycomb Group Proteins. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1480. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6380-5_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6380-5_21
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