The spatiotemporal program of DNA replication is associated with specific combinations of chromatin marks in human cells

PLoS Genet. 2014 May 1;10(5):e1004282. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004282. eCollection 2014 May.

Abstract

The duplication of mammalian genomes is under the control of a spatiotemporal program that orchestrates the positioning and the timing of firing of replication origins. The molecular mechanisms coordinating the activation of about [Formula: see text] predicted origins remain poorly understood, partly due to the intrinsic rarity of replication bubbles, making it difficult to purify short nascent strands (SNS). The precise identification of origins based on the high-throughput sequencing of SNS constitutes a new methodological challenge. We propose a new statistical method with a controlled resolution, adapted to the detection of replication origins from SNS data. We detected an average of 80,000 replication origins in different cell lines. To evaluate the consistency between different protocols, we compared SNS detections with bubble trapping detections. This comparison demonstrated a good agreement between genome-wide methods, with 65% of SNS-detected origins validated by bubble trapping, and 44% of bubble trapping origins validated by SNS origins, when compared at the same resolution. We investigated the interplay between the spatial and the temporal programs of replication at fine scales. We show that most of the origins detected in regions replicated in early S phase are shared by all the cell lines investigated whereas cell-type-specific origins tend to be replicated in late S phase. We shed a new light on the key role of CpG islands, by showing that 80% of the origins associated with CGIs are constitutive. Our results further show that at least 76% of CGIs are origins of replication. The analysis of associations with chromatin marks at different timing of cell division revealed new potential epigenetic regulators driving the spatiotemporal activity of replication origins. We highlight the potential role of H4K20me1 and H3K27me3, the coupling of which is correlated with increased efficiency of replication origins, clearly identifying those marks as potential key regulators of replication origins.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cell Line
  • Chromatin / genetics*
  • DNA Replication*
  • Humans

Substances

  • Chromatin

Grants and funding

Part of this work was supported by the ABS4NGS ANR project (ANR-11-BINF-0001-06). The team of MNP is supported by grants from the ARC and the Ligue Contre le Cancer and belongs to the network of Excellence Who am I? (ANR-11-LABX-0071)/Investments for the Future program ANR-11-IDEX-0005-01). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.