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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2023.05.11.540453

Enhlink infers distal and context-specific enhancer-promoter linkages

Poirion, O. B.·Zuo, W.·Spruce, C.·Daigle, S. L.·Olson, A.·Skelly, D. A.·Chesler, E. J.·Baker, C. L.·White, B. S.
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Abstract

Enhancers play a crucial role in regulating gene expression and their functional status can be queried with cell type precision using using single-cell (sc)ATAC-seq. To facilitate analysis of such data, we developed Enhlink, a novel computational approach that leverages single -cell signals to infer linkages between regulatory DNA sequences, such as enhancers and promoters. Enhlink uses an ensemble strategy that integrates cell-level technical covariates to control for batch effects and biological covariates to infer robust condition-specific links and their associated p-values. It can integrate simultaneous gene expression and chromatin accessibility measurements of individual cells profiled by multi-omic experiments for increased specificity. We evaluated Enhlink using simulated and real scATAC-seq data, including those paired with physical enhancer-promoter links enumerated by promoter capture Hi-C and with multi-omic scATAC-/RNA-seq data we generated from the mouse striatum. These examples demonstrated that our method outperforms popular alternative strategies. In conjunction with eQTL analysis, Enhlink revealed a putative super-enhancer regulating key cell type-specific markers of striatal neurons. Taken together, our analyses demonstrate that Enhlink is accurate, powerful, and provides features that can lead to novel biological insights.

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Poirion, O. B., Zuo, W., Spruce, C., Daigle, S. L., Olson, A., Skelly, D. A., Chesler, E. J., Baker, C. L., White, B. S.. 2023-05-11. Enhlink infers distal and context-specific enhancer-promoter linkages. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.11.540453

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