Cohesin regulates tissue-specific expression by stabilizing highly occupied cis-regulatory modules

Abstract

The cohesin protein complex contributes to transcriptional regulation in a CTCF-independent manner by colocalizing with master regulators at tissue-specific loci. The regulation of transcription involves the concerted action of multiple transcription factors (TFs) and cohesin's role in this context of combinatorial TF binding remains unexplored. To investigate cohesin-non-CTCF (CNC) binding events in vivo we mapped cohesin and CTCF, as well as a collection of tissuespecific and ubiquitous transcriptional regulators using ChIP-seq in primary mouse liver. We observe a positive correlation between the number of distinct TFs bound and the presence of CNC sites. In contrast to regions of the geno..