A novel method for discovering local spatial clusters of genomic regions with functional relationships from DNA contact maps

摘要

Motivation: The three-dimensional structure of genomes makes it possible for genomic regions not adjacent in the primary sequence to be spatially proximal. These DNA contacts have been found to be related to various molecular activities. Previous methods for analyzing DNA contact maps obtained from Hi-C experiments have largely focused on studying individual interactions, forming spatial clusters composed of contiguous blocks of genomic locations, or classifying these clusters into general categories based on some global properties of the contact maps.