Chromatin accessibility based characterization of gene regulatory network of P. falciparum blood stage development

We present ATAC-seq combined with direction RNA seq data for eight time points across the intraerythorcytic development cycle of Plasmodium falciparum 3D7. ATAC peaks were called by MACS2 using ATAC-seq libraries generated with genomic DNA as a control. The majority of identified ATAC peaks were located in intergenic regions and captured most (95%) of previously identified binding sites of the transcription factor required for the expression of most invasion-related genes PfAP2-I (Santos et al., 2017). The robustness of the ATAC-seq dataset was confirmed with a second biological replicate both in terms of peak location and relative peak accessibility pattern. Peaks were assigned to the closest gene and the majority of peaks showed a clear positive correlation between chromatin accessibility pattern and relative mRNA abundance (Pearson correlation > 0.6). In addition, they were sufficient to drive the stage-specific expression of a reporter gene, demonstrating their functionality. Motif searches restricted to accessible regions showed enrichment of several predicted Plasmodium motifs while also predicting several novel regulatory elements. ATAC-seq and RNA-seq at 8 time points across the intraerytrocytic development cycle of P. falciparum 3D7 .