A cookbook for DNase Hi-C.

BACKGROUND: The Hi-C technique is widely employed to study the 3-dimensional chromatin architecture and to assemble genomes. The conventional in situ Hi-C protocol employs restriction enzymes to digest chromatin, which results in nonuniform genomic coverage. Using sequence-agnostic restriction enzymes, such as DNAse I, could help to overcome this limitation. RESULTS: In this study, we compare different DNAse Hi-C protocols and identify the critical steps that significantly affect the efficiency of the protocol. In particular, we show that the SDS quenching strategy strongly affects subsequent chromatin digestion. The presence of biotinylated oligonucleotide adapters may lead to ligase reaction by-products, which can be avoided by rational design of the adapter sequences. Moreover, the use of nucleotide-exchange enzymes for biotin fill-in enables simultaneous labelling and repair of DNA ends, similar to the conventional Hi-C protocol. These improvements simplify the protocol, making it less expensive and time-consuming. CONCLUSIONS: We propose a new robust protocol for the preparation of DNAse Hi-C libraries from cultured human cells and blood samples supplemented with experimental controls and computational tools for the evaluation of library quality.

Homocystinuria due to cystathionine beta-synthase (CBS) deficiency in Russia: Molecular and clinical characterization.

We present the results of the 45-year clinical observation of 27 Russian homocystinuria patients. We made a mutation analysis of the CBS gene for thirteen patients from eleven unrelated genealogies. All patients except for the two were compound heterozygotes for the mutations detected. The most frequent mutation in the cohort investigated was splice mutation IVS11-2a->c. We detected one new nonsense mutation, one new missense-mutation and three novel small deletions. We also report the clinical case of the B6-responsive patient genotyped as Ile278Thr/Cys109Arg.