Chromatin profiling has emerged as a powerful means for genome annotation and detection of regulatory activity. Here we map nine chromatin marks across nine cell types to systematically characterize regulatory elements, their cell type-specificities, and their functional interactions. Focusing on cell type-specific patterns of promoters and enhancers, we define multi-cell activity profiles for chromatin state, gene expression, regulatory motif enrichment, and regulator expression. We use correlations between these profiles to link enhancers to putative target genes, and predict the cell type-specific activators and repressors that modulate them. The resulting annotations and regulatory predictions have implications for interpreting genome-wide association studies. Top-scoring disease SNPs are frequently positioned within enhancer elements specifically active in relevant cell types, and in some cases affect a motif instance for a predicted regulator, thus proposing a mechanism for the association. Our study presents a general framework for deciphering cis-regulatory connections and their roles in disease.

TALENs are important new tools for genome engineering. Fusions of transcription activator-like (TAL) effectors of plant pathogenic Xanthomonas spp. to the FokI nuclease, TALENs bind and cleave DNA in pairs. Binding specificity is determined by customizable arrays of polymorphic amino acid repeats in the TAL effectors. We present a method and reagents for efficiently assembling TALEN constructs with custom repeat arrays. We also describe design guidelines based on naturally occurring TAL effectors and their binding sites. Using software that applies these guidelines, in nine genes from plants, animals and protists, we found candidate cleavage sites on average every 35 bp. Each of 15 sites selected from this set was cleaved in a yeast-based assay with TALEN pairs constructed with our reagents. We used two of the TALEN pairs to mutate HPRT1 in human cells and ADH1 in Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts. Our reagents include a plasmid construct for making custom TAL effectors and one for TAL effector fusions to additional proteins of interest. Using the former, we constructed de novo a functional analog of AvrHah1 of Xanthomonas gardneri. The complete plasmid set is available through the non-profit repository AddGene and a web-based version of our software is freely accessible online.

Summary Clonal evolution is a key feature of cancer progression and relapse. We studied intratumoral heterogeneity in 149 chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cases by integrating whole-exome sequence and copy number to measure the fraction of cancer cells harboring each somatic mutation. We identified driver mutations as predominantly clonal (e.g., MYD88, trisomy 12 and del(13q)) or subclonal (e.g., SF3B1, TP53), corresponding to earlier and later events in CLL evolution. We sampled leukemia cells from 18 patients at two timepoints. Ten of 12 CLL cases treated with chemotherapy (but only 1 of 6 without treatment) underwent clonal evolution, predominantly involving subclones with driver mutations (e.g., SF3B1, TP53) that expanded over time. Furthermore, presence of a subclonal driver mutation was an independent risk factor for rapid disease progression. Our study thus uncovers patterns of clonal evolution in CLL, providing insights into its stepwise transformation, and links the presence of subclones with adverse clinical outcome.