Predicting allele specific expression from allele specific binding

Allele specific expression (ASE) is widespread in many species including cows. Therefore, regulatory regions which control gene expression should show cis-regulatory variation which mirrors this differential expression within the animal. ChIP-seq peaks for histone modifications and transcription factor binding measure activity at functional regions and the height of some peaks have been shown to correlate across tissues with the expression of particular genes, suggesting these peaks are putative regulatory regions. In this study we investigate whether ChIP-seq peaks for four histone modifications and the transcription factor CTCF show allele specific binding (ASB), and identified ASE, in the bovine genome in multiple tissues. We then investigate whether peak height and gene expression, which correlates across tissues, also correlates within the animal by investigating whether the direction of ASB in putative regulatory regions, mirrors that of the ASE in the genes they are putatively regulating. We found that ASE and ASB were widespread in the bovine genome but vary in extent between tissues. However, even when the height of a peak was positively correlated across tissues with expression of an exon, ASE of the exon and ASB of the peak were in the same direction only half the time. A likely explanation for this finding is that the correlations between peak height and exon expression do not indicate that the height of the peak causes the extent of exon expression, at least in some cases. This study is part of the FAANG project, promoting rapid prepublication of data to support the research community. These data are released under Fort Lauderdale principles, as confirmed in the Toronto Statement (Toronto International Data Release Workshop. Birney et al. 2009. Pre-publication data sharing. Nature 461:168-170). Any use of this dataset must abide by the FAANG data sharing principles. Data producers reserve the right to make the first publication of a global analysis of this data. If you are unsure if you are allowed to publish on this dataset, please contact the FAANG Data Coordination Centre and FAANG consortium (email [e-mail] and cc [e-mail]) to enquire. The full guidelines can be found at http://www.faang.org/data-share-principle