Principal Investigator Bin Zhang
Genome-wide chromosome conformation capture (HiC) experiments provide a rich set of high-resolution data concerning the spatial organization of the genome. Via chemical cross-linking and high-throughput sequencing, HiC experiments determine the frequency at which any given pair of genomic loci of kilobase pair in length comes in close spatial proximity inside the cell nucleus. As these experiments probe the genome in its native environment, structural models that incorporate the HiC-generated loci contacts provide a more detailed and realistic 3D representation of the genome. We developed a maximum entropy approach to derive information theoretic energy landscapes of the chromosome that rigorous reproduce the contact probabilities measured in Hi-C. This approach has been applied to experimental data collected from both interphase and metaphase chromosomes, revealing many features of chromosome structures that were not obvious from direct analysis of the HiC contact map.