Nonparametric Tests for Differential Histone Enrichment with ChIP-Seq Data

Chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) is a powerful method for analyzing protein interactions with DNA. It can be applied to identify the binding sites of transcription factors (TFs) and genomic landscape of histone modification marks (HMs). Previous research has largely focused on developing peak-calling procedures to detect the binding sites for TFs. However, these procedures may fail when applied to ChIP-seq data of HMs, which have diffuse signals and multiple local peaks. In addition, it is important to identify genes with differential histone enrichment regions between two experimental conditions, such as different cellular states or different time points. Parametric methods based on Poisson/negative binomial distribution have been proposed to address this differential enrichment problem and most of these methods require biological replications. However, many ChIP-seq data usually have a few or even no replicates. We propose a nonparametric method to identify the genes with differential histone enrichment regions even without replicates. Our method is based on nonparametric hypothesis testing and kernel smoothing in order to capture the spatial differences in histone-enriched profiles. We demonstrate the method using ChIP-seq data on a comparative epigenomic profiling of adipogenesis of murine adipose stromal cells and the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) ChIP-seq data. Our method identifies many genes with differential H3K27ac histone enrichment profiles at gene promoter regions between proliferating preadipocytes and mature adipocytes in murine 3T3-L1 cells. The test statistics also correlate with the gene expression changes well and are predictive to gene expression changes, indicating that the identified differentially enriched regions are indeed biologically meaningful.