The native cistrome and sequence motif families of the maize ear

PLoS Genet. 2021 Aug 12;17(8):e1009689. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009689. eCollection 2021 Aug.

Abstract

Elucidating the transcriptional regulatory networks that underlie growth and development requires robust ways to define the complete set of transcription factor (TF) binding sites. Although TF-binding sites are known to be generally located within accessible chromatin regions (ACRs), pinpointing these DNA regulatory elements globally remains challenging. Current approaches primarily identify binding sites for a single TF (e.g. ChIP-seq), or globally detect ACRs but lack the resolution to consistently define TF-binding sites (e.g. DNAse-seq, ATAC-seq). To address this challenge, we developed MNase-defined cistrome-Occupancy Analysis (MOA-seq), a high-resolution (< 30 bp), high-throughput, and genome-wide strategy to globally identify putative TF-binding sites within ACRs. We used MOA-seq on developing maize ears as a proof of concept, able to define a cistrome of 145,000 MOA footprints (MFs). While a substantial majority (76%) of the known ATAC-seq ACRs intersected with the MFs, only a minority of MFs overlapped with the ATAC peaks, indicating that the majority of MFs were novel and not detected by ATAC-seq. MFs were associated with promoters and significantly enriched for TF-binding and long-range chromatin interaction sites, including for the well-characterized FASCIATED EAR4, KNOTTED1, and TEOSINTE BRANCHED1. Importantly, the MOA-seq strategy improved the spatial resolution of TF-binding prediction and allowed us to identify 215 motif families collectively distributed over more than 100,000 non-overlapping, putatively-occupied binding sites across the genome. Our study presents a simple, efficient, and high-resolution approach to identify putative TF footprints and binding motifs genome-wide, to ultimately define a native cistrome atlas.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Binding Sites
  • Chromatin Immunoprecipitation Sequencing
  • DNA Footprinting / methods*
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
  • Plant Proteins / genetics
  • Plant Proteins / metabolism
  • Promoter Regions, Genetic*
  • Regulatory Elements, Transcriptional
  • Transcription Factors / metabolism*
  • Whole Genome Sequencing
  • Zea mays / genetics*

Substances

  • Plant Proteins
  • Transcription Factors

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.13012670.v1
  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.13012673.v1