Genetic variation in histone modifications and gene expression identifies regulatory variants in the mammary gland of cattle

Abstract

Background: Causal variants for complex traits, such as eQTL are often found in non-coding regions of the genome, where they are hypothesised to influence phenotypes by regulating gene expression. Many regulatory regions are marked by histone modifications, which can be assayed by chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq). Sequence reads from ChIP-seq form peaks at putative regulatory regions, which may reflect the amount of regulatory activity at this region. Therefore, eQTL which are also associated with differences in histone modifications are excellent candidate causal variants. Results: We assayed the histone modifications H3K4Me3, H3K4Me1 and H3K27ac and mRNA in t..