Laboratoire de Physique Théorique
Toulouse - UMR 5152

Recently developed « Chromosome Conformational Capture » experimental techniques give now access to the contact frequency between genomic loci in living cells. I will present how theoretical approaches could help to extract biological information on the genomic functions from these experimental data. By analyzing spatially detailed and quantitative 3C data using a polymer model, we showed that a conformational transition of the chromatin fiber at the supranucleosomal scale could regulate transcription at the locus Igf2-H19 in mouse. We also devised a novel fast algorithm to reconstruct 3D genome architecture from genome-wide Hi-C contact maps. This algorithm allows a multiscale visualization of the 3D structure of human chromosomes. This makes possible to investigate various genomic annotations, e.g. epigenetic profiles or protein-binding maps, within their 3D context.

Related references :
Lesne et al. Nature Methods 11, 1141 (2014)
Lesne et al. J. Phys. Cond. Matter 27, 064115 (2015)
Ea et al. Genes 6, in print (2015)