Mitochondrial heteroplasmy in vertebrates using ChIP-sequencing data

Mitochondrial heteroplasmy, the presence of more than one mtDNA variant in a cell or individual is not as uncommon as previously thought. It is mostly due to the high mutation rate of the mtDNA and limited repair mechanisms present in the mitochondrion. The phenomenon has been studied mostly in human samples and in medical contexts. Heteroplasmy has also been researched in other species in fields such as forensics or genetic foot printing, but these studies usually focused on contained families within closely related species. Here we describe a large cross-species evaluation of heteroplasmy in mammals. We employed a novel approach to detect mitochondrial heteroplasmy in both novel and previously reported ChIP-sequencing datasets, which include concomitant mitochondrial DNA sequenced in the experiment. Here, we report novel ChIP-seq experiments for H3K4me1 and CEBPA across mammals, as well as some H3K4me3, H3K27ac and total histone H3 experiments. Most of the reported CEBPA experiments are good quality pull-downs, however the quality of many of the other experiments reported here has not been interrogated in detail. Whereas this does not affect the investigation of mitochondrial DNA pollution for the purposes of this study, both H3K4me1 and total histone H3 ChIP-seq datasets were often sequenced to relatively low depth and showed low ChIP enrichment compared to the other antibodies.