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Diversity and evolution of chromatin regulatory states across eukaryotes

ABSTRACT: Histone post-translational modifications (hPTMs) are key regulators of chromatin states, influencing gene expression, epigenetic memory, and transposable element repression across eukaryotic genomes. While many hPTMs are evolutionarily conserved, the extent to which the chromatin states they define are similarly preserved remains unclear. Here, we developed a combinatorial indexing ChIP-seq method to simultaneously profile specific hPTMs across diverse eukaryotic lineages, including amoebozoans, rhizarians, discobans, and cryptomonads. Our analyses revealed highly conserved euchromatin states at active gene promoters and gene bodies. In contrast, we observed diverse configurations of repressive heterochromatin states associated with silenced genes and transposable elements, characterized by various combinations of hPTMs such as H3K9me3, H3K27me3 and/or different H3K79 methylations. These findings suggest that while core hPTMs are ancient and broadly conserved, their functional readout has diversified throughout eukaryotic evolution, shaping lineage-specific chromatin landscapes.

ORGANISM(S): Saccharomyces Cerevisiae

SUBMITTER: Cristina Chiva

PROVIDER: PXD070263 | panorama | Thu Apr 30 00:00:00 BST 2026

REPOSITORIES: PanoramaPublic

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Project description:Chromatin profiling has emerged as a powerful means for annotating genomic elements and detecting regulatory activity. Here we generate and analyze a compendium of epigenomic maps for nine chromatin marks across nine cell types, in order to systematically characterize cis-regulatory elements, their cell type-specificities, and their functional interactions. We first identify recurrent combinations of histone modifications and use them to annotate diverse regulatory elements including promoters, enhancers, transcripts and insulators in each cell type. We next characterize the dynamics of these elements, revealing meaningful patterns of activity for promoter states and exquisite cell type-selectivity for enhancer states. We define multi-cell activity profiles that reflect the patterns of enhancer state activity across cell types, as well as analogous profiles for gene expression, regulatory motif enrichments, and expression of the corresponding regulators. We use correlations between these profiles to link enhancers to putative target genes, to infer cell type-specific activators and repressors, and to predict and validate functional regulator binding motifs in specific chromatin states. These functional annotations and regulatory predictions enable us to revisit intergenic single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with human disease in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We find that for several diseases, top-scoring SNPs are precisely positioned within enhancer elements specifically active in relevant cell types. In several cases a disease variant affects a motif instance for one of the predicted causal regulators, thus providing a potential mechanistic explanation for the disease association. Our study presents a general framework for applying multi-cell chromatin state analysis to decipher cis-regulatory connections and their role in health and disease. 9 human cell types were cultured in duplicate and subject to Affymetrix profiling

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Diversity and evolution of chromatin regulatory states across eukaryotes

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