Despite its clinical importance, the SARS-CoV-2 gene set remains unresolved, hindering dissection of COVID-19 biology. We use comparative genomics to provide a high-confidence protein-coding gene ...set, characterize evolutionary constraint, and prioritize functional mutations. We select 44 Sarbecovirus genomes at ideally-suited evolutionary distances, and quantify protein-coding evolutionary signatures and overlapping constraint. We find strong protein-coding signatures for ORFs 3a, 6, 7a, 7b, 8, 9b, and a novel alternate-frame gene, ORF3c, whereas ORFs 2b, 3d/3d-2, 3b, 9c, and 10 lack protein-coding signatures or convincing experimental evidence of protein-coding function. Furthermore, we show no other conserved protein-coding genes remain to be discovered. Mutation analysis suggests ORF8 contributes to within-individual fitness but not person-to-person transmission. Cross-strain and within-strain evolutionary pressures agree, except for fewer-than-expected within-strain mutations in nsp3 and S1, and more-than-expected in nucleocapsid, which shows a cluster of mutations in a predicted B-cell epitope, suggesting immune-avoidance selection. Evolutionary histories of residues disrupted by spike-protein substitutions D614G, N501Y, E484K, and K417N/T provide clues about their biology, and we catalog likely-functional co-inherited mutations. Previously reported RNA-modification sites show no enrichment for conservation. Here we report a high-confidence gene set and evolutionary-history annotations providing valuable resources and insights on SARS-CoV-2 biology, mutations, and evolution.
ChromHMM outputs both the learned chromatin-state model parameters and the chromatin-state assignments for each genomic position. The learned emission and transition parameters are returned in both ...text and image format (Fig. 1), automatically grouping chromatin states with similar emission parameters or proximal genomic locations, although a user-specified reordering can also be used (Supplementary Figs. 12 and Supplementary Note). ChromHMM enables the study of the likely biological roles of each chromatin state based on enrichment in diverse external annotations and experimental data, shown as heat maps and tables (Fig. 1), both for direct genomic overlap and at various distances from a chromatin state.
With hundreds of epigenomic maps, the opportunity arises to exploit the correlated nature of epigenetic signals, across both marks and samples, for large-scale prediction of additional datasets. ...Here, we undertake epigenome imputation by leveraging such correlations through an ensemble of regression trees. We impute 4,315 high-resolution signal maps, of which 26% are also experimentally observed. Imputed signal tracks show overall similarity to observed signals and surpass experimental datasets in consistency, recovery of gene annotations and enrichment for disease-associated variants. We use the imputed data to detect low-quality experimental datasets, to find genomic sites with unexpected epigenomic signals, to define high-priority marks for new experiments and to delineate chromatin states in 127 reference epigenomes spanning diverse tissues and cell types. Our imputed datasets provide the most comprehensive human regulatory region annotation to date, and our approach and the ChromImpute software constitute a useful complement to large-scale experimental mapping of epigenomic information.
Recent advances in technology have led to a dramatic increase in the number of available transcription factor ChIP-seq and ChIP-chip data sets. Understanding the motif content of these data sets is ...an important step in understanding the underlying mechanisms of regulation. Here we provide a systematic motif analysis for 427 human ChIP-seq data sets using motifs curated from the literature and also discovered de novo using five established motif discovery tools. We use a systematic pipeline for calculating motif enrichment in each data set, providing a principled way for choosing between motif variants found in the literature and for flagging potentially problematic data sets. Our analysis confirms the known specificity of 41 of the 56 analyzed factor groups and reveals motifs of potential cofactors. We also use cell type-specific binding to find factors active in specific conditions. The resource we provide is accessible both for browsing a small number of factors and for performing large-scale systematic analyses. We provide motif matrices, instances and enrichments in each of the ENCODE data sets. The motifs discovered here have been used in parallel studies to validate the specificity of antibodies, understand cooperativity between data sets and measure the variation of motif binding across individuals and species.
More than 90% of common variants associated with complex traits do not affect proteins directly, but instead the circuits that control gene expression. This has increased the urgency of understanding ...the regulatory genome as a key component for translating genetic results into mechanistic insights and ultimately therapeutics. To address this challenge, we developed HaploReg (http://compbio.mit.edu/HaploReg) to aid the functional dissection of genome-wide association study (GWAS) results, the prediction of putative causal variants in haplotype blocks, the prediction of likely cell types of action, and the prediction of candidate target genes by systematic mining of comparative, epigenomic and regulatory annotations. Since first launching the website in 2011, we have greatly expanded HaploReg, increasing the number of chromatin state maps to 127 reference epigenomes from ENCODE 2012 and Roadmap Epigenomics, incorporating regulator binding data, expanding regulatory motif disruption annotations, and integrating expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) variants and their tissue-specific target genes from GTEx, Geuvadis, and other recent studies. We present these updates as HaploReg v4, and illustrate a use case of HaploReg for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-associated SNPs with putative brain regulatory mechanisms.
A plethora of epigenetic modifications have been described in the human genome and shown to play diverse roles in gene regulation, cellular differentiation and the onset of disease. Although ...individual modifications have been linked to the activity levels of various genetic functional elements, their combinatorial patterns are still unresolved and their potential for systematic de novo genome annotation remains untapped. Here, we use a multivariate Hidden Markov Model to reveal 'chromatin states' in human T cells, based on recurrent and spatially coherent combinations of chromatin marks. We define 51 distinct chromatin states, including promoter-associated, transcription-associated, active intergenic, large-scale repressed and repeat-associated states. Each chromatin state shows specific enrichments in functional annotations, sequence motifs and specific experimentally observed characteristics, suggesting distinct biological roles. This approach provides a complementary functional annotation of the human genome that reveals the genome-wide locations of diverse classes of epigenetic function.
Long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) play diverse regulatory roles in human development and disease, but little is known about their evolutionary history and constraint. Here, we characterize ...human lincRNA expression patterns in nine tissues across six mammalian species and multiple individuals. Of the 1898 human lincRNAs expressed in these tissues, we find orthologous transcripts for 80% in chimpanzee, 63% in rhesus, 39% in cow, 38% in mouse, and 35% in rat. Mammalian-expressed lincRNAs show remarkably strong conservation of tissue specificity, suggesting that it is selectively maintained. In contrast, abundant splice-site turnover suggests that exact splice sites are not critical. Relative to evolutionarily young lincRNAs, mammalian-expressed lincRNAs show higher primary sequence conservation in their promoters and exons, increased proximity to protein-coding genes enriched for tissue-specific functions, fewer repeat elements, and more frequent single-exon transcripts. Remarkably, we find that ∼20% of human lincRNAs are not expressed beyond chimpanzee and are undetectable even in rhesus. These hominid-specific lincRNAs are more tissue specific, enriched for testis, and faster evolving within the human lineage.
Association studies provide genome-wide information about the genetic basis of complex disease, but medical research has focused primarily on protein-coding variants, owing to the difficulty of ...interpreting noncoding mutations. This picture has changed with advances in the systematic annotation of functional noncoding elements. Evolutionary conservation, functional genomics, chromatin state, sequence motifs and molecular quantitative trait loci all provide complementary information about the function of noncoding sequences. These functional maps can help with prioritizing variants on risk haplotypes, filtering mutations encountered in the clinic and performing systems-level analyses to reveal processes underlying disease associations. Advances in predictive modeling can enable data-set integration to reveal pathways shared across loci and alleles, and richer regulatory models can guide the search for epistatic interactions. Lastly, new massively parallel reporter experiments can systematically validate regulatory predictions. Ultimately, advances in regulatory and systems genomics can help unleash the value of whole-genome sequencing for personalized genomic risk assessment, diagnosis and treatment.
Genome wide association studies (GWAS) provide a powerful approach for uncovering disease-associated variants in human, but fine-mapping the causal variants remains a challenge. This is partly ...remedied by prioritization of disease-associated variants that overlap GWAS-enriched epigenomic annotations. Here, we introduce a new Bayesian model RiVIERA (Risk Variant Inference using Epigenomic Reference Annotations) for inference of driver variants from summary statistics across multiple traits using hundreds of epigenomic annotations. In simulation, RiVIERA promising power in detecting causal variants and causal annotations, the multi-trait joint inference further improved the detection power. We applied RiVIERA to model the existing GWAS summary statistics of 9 autoimmune diseases and Schizophrenia by jointly harnessing the potential causal enrichments among 848 tissue-specific epigenomics annotations from ENCODE/Roadmap consortium covering 127 cell/tissue types and 8 major epigenomic marks. RiVIERA identified meaningful tissue-specific enrichments for enhancer regions defined by H3K4me1 and H3K27ac for Blood T-Cell specifically in the nine autoimmune diseases and Brain-specific enhancer activities exclusively in Schizophrenia. Moreover, the variants from the 95% credible sets exhibited high conservation and enrichments for GTEx whole-blood eQTLs located within transcription-factor-binding-sites and DNA-hypersensitive-sites. Furthermore, joint modeling the nine immune traits by simultaneously inferring and exploiting the underlying epigenomic correlation between traits further improved the functional enrichments compared to single-trait models.
Motivation: As high-throughput transcriptome sequencing provides evidence for novel transcripts in many species, there is a renewed need for accurate methods to classify small genomic regions as ...protein coding or non-coding. We present PhyloCSF, a novel comparative genomics method that analyzes a multispecies nucleotide sequence alignment to determine whether it is likely to represent a conserved protein-coding region, based on a formal statistical comparison of phylogenetic codon models.
Results: We show that PhyloCSF's classification performance in 12-species Drosophila genome alignments exceeds all other methods we compared in a previous study. We anticipate that this method will be widely applicable as the transcriptomes of many additional species, tissues and subcellular compartments are sequenced, particularly in the context of ENCODE and modENCODE, and as interest grows in long non-coding RNAs, often initially recognized by their lack of protein coding potential rather than conserved RNA secondary structures.
Availability and Implementation: The Objective Caml source code and executables for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X are freely available at http://compbio.mit.edu/PhyloCSF
Contact:
mlin@mit.edu; manoli@mit.edu
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