Chinese and foreign scholars NAR published a paper: Non-coding regulatory elements can stabilize the three-dimensional structure of chromatin

In the non-coding sequences of the human genome, promoters and enhancers are important functional elements for regulating gene expression

On April 7, 2022, Wei Wensheng's group from Peking University and Wang Wei's group from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) jointly published a research titled " Regulatory elements can be essential for maintaining broad chromatin organization and cell viability " at Nucleic Acids Research In this paper, based on the EpiTensor algorithm established in the previous work (Zhu et al.

Due to the lack of high-resolution Hi-C data that can effectively discover enhancer/promoter interactions, this study used the EpiTensor algorithm with a resolution of up to 200-bp to predict 73 normal cell lines and 5 cancer cell lines Active enhancer/promoter three-dimensional interactions in /tissue obtained hotspots of strong interaction sites of enhancer-promoter, enhancer-enhancer, and promoter-promoter

Figure 1 Discovery and high-throughput functional screening of hotspot sites

In order to explore whether the deletion of the hotspot site affects chromatin structure, the collaborative team selected the hotspot_10_25 site for further study, which does not interact with any essential genes

Figure 2.

It is worth mentioning that in November 2021, two research groups, Wang Wei and Wei Wensheng, jointly reported for the first time in Science Advances that a non-coding site hub without any epigenetic signal can stabilize the three-dimensional structure of chromatin and maintain cell survival ( Ding et al.

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