Quartet-based inference of cell differentiation trees from ChIP-Seq histone modification data

PLoS One. 2019 Sep 26;14(9):e0221270. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221270. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Understanding cell differentiation-the process of generation of distinct cell-types-plays a pivotal role in developmental and evolutionary biology. Transcriptomic information and epigenetic marks are useful to elucidate hierarchical developmental relationships among cell-types. Standard phylogenetic approaches such as maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood and neighbor joining have previously been applied to ChIP-Seq histone modification data to infer cell-type trees, showing how diverse types of cells are related. In this study, we demonstrate the applicability and suitability of quartet-based phylogenetic tree estimation techniques for constructing cell-type trees. We propose two quartet-based pipelines for constructing cell phylogeny. Our methods were assessed for their validity in inferring hierarchical differentiation processes of various cell-types in H3K4me3, H3K27me3, H3K36me3, and H3K27ac histone mark data. We also propose a robust metric for evaluating cell-type trees.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Biological Evolution
  • Cell Differentiation / genetics*
  • Cell Line
  • Cell Line, Tumor
  • Chromatin Immunoprecipitation Sequencing
  • Databases, Genetic
  • Epigenesis, Genetic
  • Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental
  • Histone Code / genetics*
  • Humans
  • Likelihood Functions
  • Models, Genetic
  • Phylogeny

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the Information and Communication Technology Division (ICT Division), Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.