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Global reference mapping of human transcription factor footprints
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
Abstract Combinatorial binding of transcription factors to regulatory DNA underpins gene regulation in all organisms. Genetic variation in regulatory regions has been connected with diseases and diverse phenotypic traits 1 , yet it remains challenging to distinguish variants that impact regulatory function 2 . Genomic DNase I footprinting enables quantitative, nucleotide-resolution delineation of sites of transcription factor occupancy within native chromatin 3–5 . However, to date only a small fraction of such sites have been precisely resolved on the human genome sequence 5 . To enable comprehensive mapping of transcription factor footprints, we produced high-density DNase I cleavage maps from 243 human cell and tissue types and states and integrated these data to delineate at nucleotide resolution ~4.5 million compact genomic elements encoding transcription factor occupancy. We map the fine-scale structure of ~1.6 million DHS and show that the overwhelming majority is populated by well-spaced sites of single transcription factor:DNA interaction. Cell context-dependent cis-regulation is chiefly executed by wholesale actuation of accessibility at regulatory DNA versus by differential transcription factor occupancy within accessible elements. We show further that the well-described enrichment of disease- and phenotypic trait-associated genetic variants in regulatory regions 1,6 is almost entirely attributable to variants localizing within footprints, and that functional variants impacting transcription factor occupancy are nearly evenly partitioned between loss- and gain-of-function alleles. Unexpectedly, we find that the global density of human genetic variation is markedly increased within transcription factor footprints, revealing an unappreciated driver of cis-regulatory evolution. Our results provide a new framework for both global and nucleotide-precision analyses of gene regulatory mechanisms and functional genetic variation.
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“In some cases, we found statistically weak evidence for stronger correlations with other factors from the same motif family,45 e.g., the activity of enhancers with Gfi1 sites was correlated with the expression of Gfi1b (Figure S3C).”
From Design principles of cell-state-specific enhancers in hematopoiesis (2025) · cites this paper as [45]
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Cites
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Self-citationThe Human Transcription Factors
Lambert, S. A., Jolma, A., Campitelli, L. F., Das, P. K., Yin, Y., Albu, M., Chen, X., Taipale, J., Hughes, T. R., & Weirauch, M. T. (2018) · Cell · doi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.01.029 · Cited by 3,399
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Self-citationPartitioning heritability by functional annotation using genome-wide association summary statistics
ReproGen Consortium, Finucane, H. K., Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, The RACI Consortium, Bulik-Sullivan, B., Gusev, A., Trynka, G., Reshef, Y., Loh, P.-R., Anttila, V., et al. (2015) · Nature Genetics · doi:10.1038/ng.3404 · Cited by 2,604
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Expanded encyclopaedias of DNA elements in the human and mouse genomes
The ENCODE Project Consortium, Abascal, F., Acosta, R., Addleman, N. J., Adrian, J., Afzal, V., Ai, R., Aken, B., Akiyama, J. A., Jammal, O. A., et al. (2020) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2493-4 · Cited by 2,378
JASPAR 2022: the 9th release of the open-access database of transcription factor binding profiles
Castro-Mondragon, J. A., Riudavets-Puig, R., Rauluseviciute, I., Berhanu Lemma, R., Turchi, L., Blanc-Mathieu, R., Lucas, J., Boddie, P., Khan, A., Manosalva Pérez, N., et al. (2022) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkab1113 · Cited by 1,935
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Ebert, P., Audano, P. A., Zhu, Q., Rodriguez-Martin, B., Porubsky, D., Bonder, M. J., Sulovari, A., Ebler, J., Zhou, W., Serra Mari, R., et al. (2021) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.abf7117 · Cited by 702
Genome-wide enhancer maps link risk variants to disease genes
Nasser, J., Bergman, D. T., Fulco, C. P., Guckelberger, P., Doughty, B. R., Patwardhan, T. A., Jones, T. R., Nguyen, T. H., Ulirsch, J. C., Lekschas, F., et al. (2021) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03446-x · Cited by 669
“This is because, although the larger region is important for counting reads in H3K27ac ChIP–seq, which occur on flanking nucleosomes, DNA sequences important for enhancer function—such as transcription factor footprints—are most often found in the central nucleosome-free region 49 .”
BackgroundTrevino, A. E., Müller, F., Andersen, J., Sundaram, L., Kathiria, A., Shcherbina, A., Farh, K., Chang, H. Y., Pașca, A. M., Kundaje, A., et al. (2021) · Cell · doi:10.1016/j.cell.2021.07.039 · Cited by 478
Metadata
- Authors
- Vierstra, J., Lazar, J., Sandstrom, R., Halow, J., Lee, K., Bates, D., Diegel, M., Dunn, D., Neri, F., Haugen, E., Rynes, E., Reynolds, A., Nelson, J., Johnson, A., Frerker, M., Buckley, M., Kaul, R., Meuleman, W., & Stamatoyannopoulos, J. A.
- Affiliations
- Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Vierstra, Jeff
- Stamatoyannopoulos, John A.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2020-07-29
- Volume
- 583
- Issue
- 7818
- Pages
- 729-736
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- PMC
- PMC7410829
- OpenAlex
- W3046196569
- Cited by
- 386
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 48 · 2025: 84 · 2024: 75 · 2023: 58 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 67 · 2020: 15
- FWCI
- 15.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- GlaxoSmithKline
- National Institutes of Health
- National Human Genome Research Institute (U54HG007010, UM1HG009444, R35HG011317)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genetic Associations and Epidemiology
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Chromatin Remodeling and Cancer
- Keywords
- transcription factor footprints, DNase I footprinting, DNase I hypersensitive sites, transcription factor occupancy, chromatin accessibility, cis-regulatory evolution, loss-of-function alleles, gain-of-function alleles, gene expression regulation, functional genetic variation
- MeSH terms
- Deoxyribonuclease I, DNA, Genetics, Population, Humans, Models, Molecular, Regulatory Sequences, Nucleic Acid, Transcription Factors, Genome, Human, Consensus Sequence, DNA Footprinting, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide, Genome-Wide Association Study
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