Predictive Models of Gene Regulation from High-Throughput Epigenomics Data

The epigenetic regulation of gene expression involves multiple factors. The synergistic or antagonistic action of these factors has suggested the existence of an epigenetic code for gene regulation. Highthroughput sequencing (HTS) provides an opportunity to explore this code and to build quantitative models of gene regulation based on epigenetic differences between specific cellular conditions. We describe a new computational framework that facilitates the systematic integration of HTS epigenetic data. Our method relates epigenetic signals to expression by comparing two conditions. We show its effectiveness by building a model that predicts with high accuracy significant expression differences between two cell lines, using epigenetic data from the ENCODE project. Our analyses provide evidence for a degenerate epigenetic code, which involves multiple genic regions. In particular, signal changes at the 1st exon, 1st intron, and downstream of the polyadenylation site are found to associate strongly with expression regulation. Our analyses also show a different epigenetic code for intron-less and intron-containing genes. Our work provides a general methodology to do integrative analysis of epigenetic differences between cellular conditions that can be applied to other studies, like cell differentiation or carcinogenesis.