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Genome-scale high-resolution mapping of activating and repressive nucleotides in regulatory regions

Nature Biotechnology volume 34, pages 1180–1190 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) enable nucleotide-resolution dissection of transcriptional regulatory regions, such as enhancers, but only few regions at a time. Here we present a combined experimental and computational approach, Systematic high-resolution activation and repression profiling with reporter tiling using MPRA (Sharpr-MPRA), that allows high-resolution analysis of thousands of regions simultaneously. Sharpr-MPRA combines dense tiling of overlapping MPRA constructs with a probabilistic graphical model to recognize functional regulatory nucleotides, and to distinguish activating and repressive nucleotides, using their inferred contribution to reporter gene expression. We used Sharpr-MPRA to test 4.6 million nucleotides spanning 15,000 putative regulatory regions tiled at 5-nucleotide resolution in two human cell types. Our results recovered known cell-type-specific regulatory motifs and evolutionarily conserved nucleotides, and distinguished known activating and repressive motifs. Our results also showed that endogenous chromatin state and DNA accessibility are both predictive of regulatory function in reporter assays, identified retroviral elements with activating roles, and uncovered 'attenuator' motifs with repressive roles in active chromatin.

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Figure 1: Experimental design.
Figure 2: Tiling enhancer regions in pilot design revealed regulatory segments at 30-bp resolution.
Figure 3: Scale-up design permits dissection of regulatory regions at high resolution.
Figure 4: Comparison of Sharpr-MPRA with motif annotations.
Figure 5: Regulatory activity of ERV1 and LINE repeats.
Figure 6: Endogenous chromatin state is predictive of reporter activity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Kheradpour and J.-P. Vert for useful discussions related to this work. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants R01ES024995, U01HG007912 and U01MH105578 (J.E.), R01HG006785 (T.S.M.), R01GM113708, U01HG007610, R01HG004037, U54HG006991 and U41HG007000 (M.K.), an US National Science Foundation CAREER Award #1254200, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (J.E.).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Chemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.,

    Jason Ernst

  2. Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.,

    Jason Ernst

  3. Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.,

    Jason Ernst

  4. Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.,

    Jason Ernst

  5. Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.,

    Jason Ernst

  6. Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Alexandre Melnikov, Xiaolan Zhang, Li Wang, Peter Rogov, Tarjei S Mikkelsen & Manolis Kellis

  7. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Manolis Kellis

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Contributions

J.E. and M.K. designed the sequences, developed the computational methods and analyzed the results. A.M., X.Z., L.W., P.R. and T.S.M. conducted the experimental work. T.S.M. oversaw the experimental work. J.E. and M.K. wrote the paper with substantial input from T.S.M.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jason Ernst or Manolis Kellis.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The Broad Institute has filed patents (US20140200163, EP2705152) on the original MPRA technology with T.S.M, A.M., L.W. and X.Z. among the authors. Patent protection for Sharpr-MPRA is currently being pursued with J.E. and M.K. among the authors.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–39 and Supplementary Notes 1–3 (ZIP 13193 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Pilot activating and repressive coordinates. (XLSX 46 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

Scale-up motif analysis. (XLSX 543 kb)

Supplementary Data 1

Pilot sequences and count data. (ZIP 615 kb)

Supplementary Data 2

Pilot normalized data. (ZIP 88 kb)

Supplementary Data 3

Scale-up sequences and count data. (ZIP 25795 kb)

Supplementary Data 4

Sharpr-MPRA HepG2 and K562 scores. (ZIP 36598 kb)

Supplementary Data 5

Visualization of overlapping regions. (ZIP 23181 kb)

Supplementary Data 6

HepG2 and K562 activating and repressive visualizations. (ZIP 32394 kb)

Supplementary Data 7

Pair visualization of HepG2 and K562 big differences and values. (ZIP 105421 kb)

Supplementary Data 8

Listing of all Regions tested (html and tab-delimited format). (ZIP 2106 kb)

Supplementary Source Code

Source code for the SHARPR software. (ZIP 1726 kb)

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Ernst, J., Melnikov, A., Zhang, X. et al. Genome-scale high-resolution mapping of activating and repressive nucleotides in regulatory regions. Nat Biotechnol 34, 1180–1190 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3678

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