SUMMARY Heart development is exquisitely sensitive to the precise temporal regulation of thousands of genes that govern developmental decisions during differentiation. However, we currently lack a detailed understanding of how chromatin and gene expression patterns are coordinated during developmental transitions in the cardiac lineage. Here, we interrogated the transcriptome and several histone modifications across the genome during defined stages of cardiac differentiation. We find distinct chromatin patterns that are coordinated with stage-specific expression of functionally related genes, including many human disease-associated genes. Moreover, we discover a novel pre-activation chromatin pattern at the promoters of genes associated with heart development and cardiac function. We further identify stage-specific distal enhancer elements and find enriched DNA binding motifs within these regions that predict sets of transcription factors that orchestrate cardiac differentiation. Together, these findings form a basis for understanding developmentally regulated chromatin transitions during lineage commitment and the molecular etiology of congenital heart disease.

Data sets and code for all conservation measures evaluated are available at http://compbio.cs.princeton.edu/conservation/

G-quadruplex (G4) DNA structures are extremely stable four-stranded secondary structures held together by non-canonical G-G base pairs. Genome-wide chromatin immuno-precipitation was used to determine the in vivo binding sites of the multi-functional S. cerevisiae Pif1 DNA helicase, a potent unwinder of G4 structures in vitro. G4 motifs were a significant subset of the high confidence Pif1 binding sites. Replication slowed in the vicinity of these motifs, and they were prone to breakage in Pif1-deficient cells, while non G4 Pif1 binding sites did not show this behavior. Introducing many copies of G4 motifs caused slow growth in replication stressed Pif1 deficient cells that was relieved by spontaneous mutations that eliminated their ability to form G4 structures, bind Pif1, slow DNA replication and stimulate DNA breakage. These data suggest that G4 structures form in vivo and that they are resolved by Pif1 to prevent replication fork stalling and DNA breakage.

Identifying a protein's functional sites is an important step towards characterizing its molecular function. Numerous structure- and sequence-based methods have been developed for this problem. Here we introduce ConCavity, a small molecule binding site prediction algorithm that integrates evolutionary sequence conservation estimates with structure-based methods for identifying protein surface cavities. In large-scale testing on a diverse set of single- and multi-chain protein structures, we show that ConCavity substantially outperforms existing methods for identifying both 3D ligand binding pockets and individual ligand binding residues. As part of our testing, we perform one of the first direct comparisons of conservation-based and structure-based methods. We find that the two approaches provide largely complementary information, which can be combined to improve upon either approach alone. We also demonstrate that ConCavity has state-of-the-art performance in predicting catalytic sites and drug binding pockets. Overall, the algorithms and analysis presented here significantly improve our ability to identify ligand binding sites and further advance our understanding of the relationship between evolutionary sequence conservation and structural and functional attributes of proteins. Data, source code, and prediction visualizations are available on the ConCavity web site (http://compbio.cs.princeton.edu/concavity/).