SnapHiC-D: a computational pipeline to identify differential chromatin contacts from single-cell Hi-C data

Abstract

Single-cell high-throughput chromatin conformation capture technologies (scHi-C) has been used to map chromatin spatial organization in complex tissues. However, computational tools to detect differential chromatin contacts (DCCs) from scHi-C datasets in development and through disease pathogenesis are still lacking. Here, we present SnapHiC-D, a computational pipeline to identify DCCs between two scHi-C datasets. Compared to methods designed for bulk Hi-C data, SnapHiC-D detects DCCs with high sensitivity and accuracy. We used SnapHiC-D to identify cell-type-specific chromatin contacts at 10 Kb resolution in mouse hippocampal and human prefrontal cortical tissues, demonstrating that DCCs detected in the hippocampal and cortical cell types are generally associated with cell-type-specific gene expression patterns and epigenomic features. SnapHiC-D is freely available at https://github.com/HuMingLab/SnapHiC-D.

Keywords: cell-type specificity; differential chromatin contacts; single-cell Hi-C.