ChromCall: assigning chromatin status to defined genomic regions using epigenomic profiling data

Chromatin regulation is crucial for modulating gene expression and cellular function by altering DNA accessibility. Defining and understanding chromatin regulation across diverse biological conditions, including health and disease, requires quantification of both the presence and enrichment level of diverse DNA-binding factors and chromatin modifications across defined genomic regions. Existing approaches mainly rely on peak-based or genome-wide models, which identify high-signal regions but do not annotate chromatin status at predefined functional genomic regions, such as promoters or enhancers. This lack of region-based annotation limits downstream comparative and integrative analyses across multiple factors and datasets, prompting us to create ChromCall.

ChromCall is an R package for region-based chromatin enrichment analysis that provides a robust and extensible foundation for transparent and reproducible epigenomic profiling at predefined genomic regions. We applied ChromCall to ChIP-seq data from glioblastoma (GBM) brain tumours and found that the promoters of genes implicated in treatment resistance are significantly more likely to exhibit a combination of histone marks associated with phenotypic plasticity. This highlights a potential novel mechanism of therapeutic escape in these deadly tumours.

The R package is available on https://github.com/GliomaGenomics/ChromCall and the version used in this paper is archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19580967.