RESUMEN
Transcription Factors (TFs) regulate gene expression by facilitating or disrupting the formation of transcription initiation machinery at particular genomic loci. Since TF occupancy is driven in part by recognition of DNA sequence, genetic variation can influence TF-DNA associations and gene regulation. To identify variants that impact TF binding in human brain tissues, we assessed allele specific binding (ASB) at heterozygous variants for 94 TFs in 9 brain regions from two donors. Leveraging graph genomes constructed from phased genomic sequence data, we compared ChIP-seq signals between alleles at heterozygous variants within each brain region and identified thousands of variants exhibiting ASB for at least one TF. ASB reproducibility was measured by comparisons between independent experiments both within and between donors. We found that rarer alleles in the general population more frequently led to reduced TF binding, whereas common variation had an equal likelihood of increasing or decreasing binding. Motif analysis revealed TF-specific effects, with ASB variants for certain TFs displaying a greater incidence of motif alterations, as well as enrichments for variants under purifying selection. Notably, neuron-specific cis-regulatory elements (cCREs) showed depletion for ASB variants. We identified 2,670 ASB variants with prior evidence of allele-specific gene expression in the brain from GTEx data and observed increasing eQTL effect direction concordance as ASB significance increases. These results provide a valuable and unique resource for mechanistic analysis of cis-regulatory variation in human brain tissue.
RESUMEN
Transcription factors (TFs) orchestrate gene expression programs crucial for brain function, but we lack detailed information about TF binding in human brain tissue. We generated a multiomic resource (ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, RNA-seq, DNA methylation) on bulk tissues and sorted nuclei from several postmortem brain regions, including binding maps for more than 100 TFs. We demonstrate improved measurements of TF activity, including motif recognition and gene expression modeling, upon identification and removal of high TF occupancy regions. Further, predictive TF binding models demonstrate a bias for these high-occupancy sites. Neuronal TFs SATB2 and TBR1 bind unique regions depleted for such sites and promote neuronal gene expression. Binding sites for TFs, including TBR1 and PKNOX1, are enriched for risk variants associated with neuropsychiatric disorders, predominantly in neurons. This work, titled BrainTF, is a powerful resource for future studies seeking to understand the roles of specific TFs in regulating gene expression in the human brain.