An atlas of regulatory elements in chicken: A resource for chicken genetics and genomics
Zhangyuan Pan, Ying Wang, Mingshan Wang, Yuzhe Wang, Xiaoning Zhu, Shenwen Gu, Conghao Zhong, Liqi An, Mingzhu Shan, Joana Damas, and 15 more authors
Science Advances 2023
A comprehensive characterization of regulatory elements in the chicken genome across tissues will have substantial impacts on both fundamental and applied research. Here, we systematically identified and characterized regulatory elements in the chicken genome by integrating 377 genome-wide sequencing datasets from 23 adult tissues. In total, we annotated 1.57 million regulatory elements, representing 15 distinct chromatin states, and predicted about 1.2 million enhancer-gene pairs and 7662 super-enhancers. This functional annotation of the chicken genome should have wide utility on identifying regulatory elements accounting for gene regulation underlying domestication, selection, and complex trait regulation, which we explored. In short, this comprehensive atlas of regulatory elements provides the scientific community with a valuable resource for chicken genetics and genomics. Decoding the chicken regulatory machinery helps to inform selection for simple and complex traits.