SnapHiC-D: a computational pipeline to identify differential chromatin contacts from single cell Hi-C data

Single cell Hi-C (scHi-C) has been used to map genome organization in complex tissues. However, computational tools to detect dynamic chromatin contacts from scHi-C datasets in development and through disease pathogenesis are still lacking. Here, we present SnapHiC-D, a computational pipeline to identify differential chromatin contacts (DCCs) between two scHi-C datasets. Compared to methods designed for bulk Hi-C data, SnapHiC-D detects DCCs with high sensitivity and accuracy. We used SnapHiC-D to identify cell-type-specific chromatin contacts at 10 kilobase resolution in mouse hippocampal and human prefrontal cortical tissues, and demonstrated that DCCs detected in the cortical and hippocampal cell types are generally correlated with cell-type-specific gene expression patterns and epigenomic features. SnapHiC-D is freely available at https://github.com/HuMingLab/SnapHiC-D. Overall design: We performed single-nucleus Hi-C on 94 mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and 188 mouse neuron progenitor cells (NPCs).