Large-scale Comparative Study of Hi-C-based Chromatin 3D Structure Modeling Methods

  • Cheng Wang

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

Chromatin is a complex polymer molecule in eukaryotic cells, primarily consisting of DNA and histones. Many works have shown that the 3D folding of chromatin structure plays an important role in DNA expression. The recently proposed Chro- mosome Conformation Capture technologies, especially the Hi-C assays, provide us an opportunity to study how the 3D structures of the chromatin are organized. Based on the data from Hi-C experiments, many chromatin 3D structure modeling methods have been proposed. However, there is limited ground truth to validate these methods and no robust chromatin structure alignment algorithms to evaluate the performance of these methods. In our work, we first made a thorough literature review of 25 publicly available population Hi-C-based chromatin 3D structure modeling methods. Furthermore, to evaluate and to compare the performance of these methods, we proposed a novel data simulation method, which combined the population Hi-C data and single-cell Hi-C data without ad hoc parameters. Also, we designed a global and a local alignment algorithms to measure the similarity between the templates and the chromatin struc- tures predicted by different modeling methods. Finally, the results from large-scale comparative tests indicated that our alignment algorithms significantly outperform the algorithms in literature.
Date of AwardMay 17 2018
Original languageEnglish (US)
Awarding Institution
  • Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
SupervisorXin Gao (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • chromatin 3D structure
  • Hi-C
  • structure alignment
  • data simulation
  • structure modeling

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