Background Modeling dynamic regulatory networks is a major challenge since much of the protein-DN... more Background Modeling dynamic regulatory networks is a major challenge since much of the protein-DNA interaction data available is static. The Dynamic Regulatory Events Miner (DREM) uses a Hidden Markov Model-based approach to integrate this static interaction data with time series gene expression leading to models that can determine when transcription factors (TFs) activate genes and what genes they regulate. DREM has been used successfully in diverse areas of biological research.
Chromatin-state annotation using combinations of chromatin modification patterns has emerged as a... more Chromatin-state annotation using combinations of chromatin modification patterns has emerged as a powerful approach for discovering regulatory regions and their cell type–specific activity patterns and for interpreting disease-association studies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. However, the computational challenge of learning chromatin-state models from large numbers of chromatin modification datasets in multiple cell types still requires extensive bioinformatics expertise.
Viral and bacterial infections of the lower respiratory tract are major causes of morbidity and m... more Viral and bacterial infections of the lower respiratory tract are major causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Alveolar macrophages line the alveolar spaces and are the first cells of the immune system to respond to invading pathogens.
Optic nerve degeneration caused by glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Patients a... more Optic nerve degeneration caused by glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Patients affected by the normal-pressure form of glaucoma are more likely to harbor risk alleles for glaucoma-related optic nerve disease. We have performed a meta-analysis of two independent genome-wide association studies for primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) followed by a normal-pressure glaucoma (NPG, defined by intraocular pressure (IOP) less than 22 mmHg) subgroup analysis.
Summary DNA methylation, mediated by the combined action of three DNA methyltransferases (DNMT1, ... more Summary DNA methylation, mediated by the combined action of three DNA methyltransferases (DNMT1, DNMT3A, and DNMT3B), is essential for mammalian development and is a major contributor to cellular transformation.
Gene regulation is a central biological process whose disruption can lead to many diseases. This ... more Gene regulation is a central biological process whose disruption can lead to many diseases. This process is largely controlled by a dynamic network of transcription factors interacting with specific genes to control their expression. Time series microarray gene expression experiments have become a widely used technique to study the dynamics of this process. This thesis introduces new computational methods designed to better utilize data from these experiments and to integrate this data with static transcription factor-gene interaction data ...
Hundreds of chromatin regulators (CRs) control chromatin structure and function by catalyzing and... more Hundreds of chromatin regulators (CRs) control chromatin structure and function by catalyzing and binding histone modifications, yet the rules governing these key processes remain obscure. Here, we present a systematic approach to infer CR function. We developed ChIP-string, a meso-scale assay that combines chromatin immunoprecipitation with a signature readout of 487 representative loci. We applied ChIP-string to screen 145 antibodies, thereby identifying effective reagents, which we used to map the genome-wide binding of 29 CRs in two cell types. We found that specific combinations of CRs colocalize in characteristic patterns at distinct chromatin environments, at genes of coherent functions, and at distal regulatory elements. When comparing between cell types, CRs redistribute to different loci but maintain their modular and combinatorial associations. Our work provides a multiplex method that substantially enhances the ability to monitor CR binding, presents a large resource of CR maps, and reveals common principles for combinatorial CR function.
A plethora of epigenetic modifications have been described in the human genome and shown to play ... more A plethora of epigenetic modifications have been described in the human genome and shown to play diverse roles in gene regulation, cellular differentiation, and the onset of disease. While some modifications have been linked with activity levels of different functional elements, their combinatorial patterns remain unresolved, and their potential for systematic de novo genome annotation remains untapped. In this paper, we systematically discover and characterize recurrent spatially-coherent and biologically-meaningful chromatin mark combinations, or chromatin states, in human T-cells. We describe 51 distinct chromatin states, including promoter-associated, transcription-associated, active intergenic, large-scale repressed and repeat-associated states. Each chromatin state shows specific functional, experimental, conservation, annotation, and sequence-motif enrichments, revealing their distinct candidate biological roles. Overall, our work provides a complementary functional annotation of the human genome revealing the genome-wide locations of diverse classes of epigenetic functions, including previously-unsuspected chromatin states enriched in transcription end sites, distinct repeat families, and disease-SNP-associated states.
Information about the binding preferences of many transcription factors is known and characterize... more Information about the binding preferences of many transcription factors is known and characterized by a sequence binding motif. However, determining regions of the genome in which a transcription factor binds based on its motif is a challenging problem, particularly in species with large genomes, since there are often many sequences containing matches to the motif but are not bound. Several rules based on sequence conservation or location, relative to a transcription start site, have been proposed to help differentiate true binding sites from random ones. Other evidence sources may also be informative for this task. We developed a method for integrating multiple evidence sources using logistic regression classifiers. Our method works in two steps. First, we infer a score quantifying the general binding preferences of transcription factor binding at all locations based on a large set of evidence features, without using any motif specific information. Then, we combined this general binding preference score with motif information for specific transcription factors to improve prediction of regions bound by the factor. Using cross-validation and new experimental data we show that, surprisingly, the general binding preference can be highly predictive of true locations of transcription factor binding even when no binding motif is used. When combined with motif information our method outperforms previous methods for predicting locations of true binding.
Background Modeling dynamic regulatory networks is a major challenge since much of the protein-DN... more Background Modeling dynamic regulatory networks is a major challenge since much of the protein-DNA interaction data available is static. The Dynamic Regulatory Events Miner (DREM) uses a Hidden Markov Model-based approach to integrate this static interaction data with time series gene expression leading to models that can determine when transcription factors (TFs) activate genes and what genes they regulate. DREM has been used successfully in diverse areas of biological research.
Chromatin-state annotation using combinations of chromatin modification patterns has emerged as a... more Chromatin-state annotation using combinations of chromatin modification patterns has emerged as a powerful approach for discovering regulatory regions and their cell type–specific activity patterns and for interpreting disease-association studies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. However, the computational challenge of learning chromatin-state models from large numbers of chromatin modification datasets in multiple cell types still requires extensive bioinformatics expertise.
Viral and bacterial infections of the lower respiratory tract are major causes of morbidity and m... more Viral and bacterial infections of the lower respiratory tract are major causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Alveolar macrophages line the alveolar spaces and are the first cells of the immune system to respond to invading pathogens.
Optic nerve degeneration caused by glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Patients a... more Optic nerve degeneration caused by glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Patients affected by the normal-pressure form of glaucoma are more likely to harbor risk alleles for glaucoma-related optic nerve disease. We have performed a meta-analysis of two independent genome-wide association studies for primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) followed by a normal-pressure glaucoma (NPG, defined by intraocular pressure (IOP) less than 22 mmHg) subgroup analysis.
Summary DNA methylation, mediated by the combined action of three DNA methyltransferases (DNMT1, ... more Summary DNA methylation, mediated by the combined action of three DNA methyltransferases (DNMT1, DNMT3A, and DNMT3B), is essential for mammalian development and is a major contributor to cellular transformation.
Gene regulation is a central biological process whose disruption can lead to many diseases. This ... more Gene regulation is a central biological process whose disruption can lead to many diseases. This process is largely controlled by a dynamic network of transcription factors interacting with specific genes to control their expression. Time series microarray gene expression experiments have become a widely used technique to study the dynamics of this process. This thesis introduces new computational methods designed to better utilize data from these experiments and to integrate this data with static transcription factor-gene interaction data ...
Hundreds of chromatin regulators (CRs) control chromatin structure and function by catalyzing and... more Hundreds of chromatin regulators (CRs) control chromatin structure and function by catalyzing and binding histone modifications, yet the rules governing these key processes remain obscure. Here, we present a systematic approach to infer CR function. We developed ChIP-string, a meso-scale assay that combines chromatin immunoprecipitation with a signature readout of 487 representative loci. We applied ChIP-string to screen 145 antibodies, thereby identifying effective reagents, which we used to map the genome-wide binding of 29 CRs in two cell types. We found that specific combinations of CRs colocalize in characteristic patterns at distinct chromatin environments, at genes of coherent functions, and at distal regulatory elements. When comparing between cell types, CRs redistribute to different loci but maintain their modular and combinatorial associations. Our work provides a multiplex method that substantially enhances the ability to monitor CR binding, presents a large resource of CR maps, and reveals common principles for combinatorial CR function.
A plethora of epigenetic modifications have been described in the human genome and shown to play ... more A plethora of epigenetic modifications have been described in the human genome and shown to play diverse roles in gene regulation, cellular differentiation, and the onset of disease. While some modifications have been linked with activity levels of different functional elements, their combinatorial patterns remain unresolved, and their potential for systematic de novo genome annotation remains untapped. In this paper, we systematically discover and characterize recurrent spatially-coherent and biologically-meaningful chromatin mark combinations, or chromatin states, in human T-cells. We describe 51 distinct chromatin states, including promoter-associated, transcription-associated, active intergenic, large-scale repressed and repeat-associated states. Each chromatin state shows specific functional, experimental, conservation, annotation, and sequence-motif enrichments, revealing their distinct candidate biological roles. Overall, our work provides a complementary functional annotation of the human genome revealing the genome-wide locations of diverse classes of epigenetic functions, including previously-unsuspected chromatin states enriched in transcription end sites, distinct repeat families, and disease-SNP-associated states.
Information about the binding preferences of many transcription factors is known and characterize... more Information about the binding preferences of many transcription factors is known and characterized by a sequence binding motif. However, determining regions of the genome in which a transcription factor binds based on its motif is a challenging problem, particularly in species with large genomes, since there are often many sequences containing matches to the motif but are not bound. Several rules based on sequence conservation or location, relative to a transcription start site, have been proposed to help differentiate true binding sites from random ones. Other evidence sources may also be informative for this task. We developed a method for integrating multiple evidence sources using logistic regression classifiers. Our method works in two steps. First, we infer a score quantifying the general binding preferences of transcription factor binding at all locations based on a large set of evidence features, without using any motif specific information. Then, we combined this general binding preference score with motif information for specific transcription factors to improve prediction of regions bound by the factor. Using cross-validation and new experimental data we show that, surprisingly, the general binding preference can be highly predictive of true locations of transcription factor binding even when no binding motif is used. When combined with motif information our method outperforms previous methods for predicting locations of true binding.
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Papers by Jason Ernst