Biased visibility in HiC datasets marks dynamically regulated condensed and decondensed chromatin states genome-wide.

Abstract

Proximity ligation based techniques, like HiC, involve restriction digestion followed by ligation of formaldehyde cross-linked chromatin. We showed that the HiC datasets have significant bias due to differential accessibility of chromatin domains to restriction endonucleases. Through analysis of lamina-associated domains (LADs), inactive X-chromosome in mammals and polytene bands in fly, we established that the DNA in condensed chromatin had lesser accessibility to nucleases used in HiC as compared to that in decondensed chromatin. The observed bias was independent of known systematic biases attributed to length and GC content of the restriction fragments and was not appropriately corrected by computational methods. We identified novel condensed domains outside LADs, which were bordered by insulators and were dynamically associated with the developmentally regulated epigenetic and transcriptional states. Our observations suggested that the corrected read counts of existing HiC datasets can be reliably repurposed to study the dynamics of chromatin condensation and decondensation and that the existing HiC datasets should be interpreted with cautions.