SPATIaL-seq of primary human T Follicular Helper (TFH) cells and naive CD4-positive helper T cells from tonsils of healthy volunteers

Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have been successful in yielding >60 loci for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). However, it is known that GWAS just reports genomic signals and not necessarily the precise localization of culprit genes, with eQTL efforts only able to infer causality to a minority of such loci. Thus, we sought to carry out physical and direct 'variant to gene mapping' by integrating results from high-throughput chromatin conformation capture and ATAC-seq assays. This experiment refers to the chromatin conformation capture part of our work. Detecting contacts between distant regions of the genome offers a powerful opportunity to understand GWAS signals that principally reside in non-coding regions, and thus likely act as regulatory elements for neighboring genes. To move beyond analyzing one locus at a time and to improve on the low resolution of available Hi-C data, we developed a massively parallel, high resolution Capture-C based method to simultaneously characterize the genome-wide interactions of all human promoters in any cell type. We refer to this method as genome-Scale Promoter-focused Analysis of chromaTIn Looping (SPATIaL-seq). We applied this approach to study the promoter 'interactome' of primary human T Follicular Helper (TFH) cells from tonsils of healthy volunteers (3 biological replicates), a model relevant to SLE as TFH operate upstream of the activation of pathogenic autoantibody-producing B cells during the disease. We also analyzed the promoter interactome of naive CD4-positive helper T cells (3 biological replicates). We designed a custom Agilent SureSelect library targeting both ends of DpnII restriction fragments that overlap promoters of protein-coding, noncoding, antisense, snRNA, miRNA, snoRNA and lincRNA transcripts. Each library was sequenced on 8 lanes of an Illumina HiSeq 4000.