A locally convoluted cluster model for nucleosome positioning signals in chemical map

Nucleosome is the fundamental packing unit of DNA in eukaryotic cells, and its positioning plays a critical role in regulation of gene expression and chromosome functions. Using a recently developed chemical mapping method, nucleosomes can be potentially mapped with an unprecedented single-base-pair resolution. Existence of overlapping nucleosomes due to cell mixture or cell dynamics, however, causes convolution of nucleosome positioning signals. In this paper, we introduce a locally convoluted cluster model and a maximum likelihood deconvolution approach, and illustrate the effectiveness of this approach in quantification of the nucleosome positional signal in the chemical mapping data.