DNase I Hypersensitive Sites (DHS)

Excerpts from The accessible chromatin landscape of the human genome

"DNase I hypersensitive sites (DHSs) are markers of regulatory DNA and have underpinned the discovery of all classes of cis-regulatory elements including enhancers, promoters, insulators, silencers and locus control regions."

"DHSs are flanked by nucleosomes, which may acquire histone modification patterns that reflect the functional role of the adjoining regulatory DNA, such as the association of histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation (H3K4me3) with promoter elements."

"DNase I sensitivity genome-wide using massively parallel sequencing^7, 8, 9 in a total of 125 human cell and tissue types including normal differentiated primary cells (n = 71), immortalized primary cells (n = 16), malignancy-derived cell lines (n = 30) and multipotent and pluripotent progenitor cells (n = 8) (Supplementary Table 1)."

Cell types of interests include HESC H1 Human Embryonic Stem Cells, fibroblasts of foetal and adult tissues, H7-hESC Undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells, human renal epithelial cells, H9ES human embryonic stem cell (hESC) H9, iPS induced pluripotent stem cell derived from skin fibroblast, Dedifferentiated human pancreatic islets from one of the sources for PanIslets, human pancreatic islets.

DNase I hypersensitivity site sequencing protocol is demonstrated in DNase-seq: a high-resolution technique for mapping active gene regulatory elements across the genome from mammalian cells