Development of a joint evolutionary model for the genome and the epigenome

Background: Interspecies epigenome comparisons yielded functional information that cannot be revealed by genome comparison alone, begging for theoretical advances that enable principled analysis approaches. Whereas probabilistic genome evolution models provided theoretical foundation to comparative genomics studies, it remains challenging to extend DNA evolution models to epigenomes. Results: We present an effort to develop ab initio evolution models for epigenomes, by explicitly expressing the joint probability of multispecies DNA sequences and histone modifications on homologous genomic regions. This joint probability is modeled as a mixture of four components representing four evolutionary hypotheses, namely dependence and independence of interspecies epigenomic variations to sequence mutations and to sequence insertions and deletions (indels). For model fitting, we implemented a maximum likelihood method by coupling downhill simplex algorithm with dynamic programming. Based on likelihood comparisons, the model can be used to infer whether interspecies epigenomic variations depend on mutation or indels in local genomic sequences. We applied this model to analyze DNase hypersensitive regions and spermatid H3K4me3 ChIP-seq data from human and rhesus macaque. Approximately 5.5% of homologous regions in the genomes exhibited H3K4me3 modification in either species, among which approximately 67% homologous regions exhibited sequence-dependent interspecies H3K4me3 variations. Mutations accounted for less sequence-dependent H3K4me3 variations than indels. Among transposon-mediated indels, ERV1 insertions and L1 insertions were most strongly associated with H3K4me3 gains and losses, respectively. Conclusion: This work initiates a class of probabilistic evolution models that jointly model the genomes and the epigenomes, thus helps to bring evolutionary principles to comparative epigenomic studies.