Local chromatin dynamics of transcription factors imply cell-lineage specific functions during cellular differentiation

Chromatin dynamics across cellular differentiation states is an emerging perspective from which the mechanism of global gene expression regulation may be better understood. While the roles of some histone marks have been partially interpreted in terms of their association with gene transcription, the dynamics of histone marks from a loci-specific perspective during cellular differentiation is not well studied. We established a method to systematically assess the histone modification variations of genes across various cellular differentiation states. We calculated the histone modification variation scores of H3K4me3, H3K27me3 and H3K36me3 for over 1300 curated transcription factors (TFs) during human blood cell differentiation. Hematopoietic-specific TFs (identified by literature mining) were significantly overrepresented by TFs with higher histone modification variation scores. Hierarchical clustering of all TFs based on the histone modification variation scores defined a group of TFs where known or potential hematopoietic-specific TFs were remarkably enriched. Our results suggest that local chromatin state dynamics of transcription factors across cellular differentiation states could imply cell lineage-specific functions. More importantly, our method can be applied to broader systems, holding the promise to discover de novo, lineage-specific TFs by interrogating their histone modification dynamics across cell lineages.