Motivation Generating publication ready plots to display multiple genomic tracks can pose a serious challenge. Making desirable and accurate figures requires considerable effort. This is usually done by hand or by using a vector graphic software. Results pyGenomeTracks (PGT) is a modular plotting tool that easily combines multiple tracks. It enables a reproducible and standardized generation of highly customizable and publication ready images. Availability PGT is available through a graphical interface on https://usegalaxy.eu and through the command line. It is provided on conda via the bioconda channel, on pip and it is openly developed on github: https://github.com/deeptools/pyGenomeTracks. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The Galaxy HiCExplorer provides a web service at https://hicexplorer.usegalaxy.eu. It enables the integrative analysis of chromosome conformation by providing tools and computational resources to pre-process, analyse and visualize Hi-C, Capture Hi-C (cHi-C) and single-cell Hi-C (scHi-C) data. Since the last publication, Galaxy HiCExplorer has been expanded considerably with new tools to facilitate the analysis of cHi-C and to provide an in-depth analysis of Hi-C data. Moreover, it supports the analysis of scHi-C data by offering a broad range of tools. With the help of the standard graphical user interface of Galaxy, presented workflows, extensive documentation and tutorials, novices as well as Hi-C experts are supported in their Hi-C data analysis with Galaxy HiCExplorer.

Summary Due to the rapidly increasing scale and diversity of epigenomic data, modular and scalable analysis workflows are of wide interest. Here we present snakePipes, a workflow package for processing and downstream analysis of data from common epigenomic assays: ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, Bisulfite-seq, ATAC-seq, Hi-C and single-cell RNA-seq. snakePipes enables users to assemble variants of each workflow and to easily install and upgrade the underlying tools, via its simple command-line wrappers and yaml files. Availability and implementation snakePipes can be installed via conda: `conda install -c mpi-ie -c bioconda -c conda-forge snakePipes’. Source code (https://github.com/maxplanck-ie/snakepipes) and documentation (https://snakepipes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) are available online. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

During embryogenesis, the genome shifts from transcriptionally quiescent to extensively active in a process known as Zygotic Genome Activation (ZGA). In Drosophila, the pioneer factor Zelda is known to be essential for the progression of development; still, it regulates the activation of only a small subset of genes at ZGA. However, thousands of genes do not require Zelda, suggesting that other mechanisms exist. By conducting GRO-seq, HiC and ChIP-seq in Drosophila embryos, we demonstrate that up to 65% of zygotically activated genes are enriched for the histone variant H2A.Z. H2A.Z enrichment precedes ZGA and RNA Polymerase II loading onto chromatin. In vivo knockdown of maternally contributed Domino, a histone chaperone and ATPase, reduces H2A.Z deposition at transcription start sites, causes global downregulation of housekeeping genes at ZGA, and compromises the establishment of the 3D chromatin structure. We infer that H2A.Z is essential for the de novo establishment of transcriptional programs during ZGA via chromatin reorganization.

Motivation New DNA sequencing technologies have enabled the rapid analysis of many thousands of genomes from a single species. At the same time, the conventional approach of mapping sequencing reads against a single reference genome sequence is no longer adequate. However, even where multiple highquality reference genomes are available, the problem remains how one would integrate results from pairwise analyses. Availability https://github.com/LeilyR/Multi-genome-Reference.gitContact weigel@tue.mpg.de 1 Regions with shared ancestry as a result of a speciation event. 2 Regions with shared ancestry as a result of a duplication event.