Approximate time: 45 minutes

Learning Objectives

Introduction to ChIP-seq

Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) experiments are performed to identify DNA bound to specific (chromatin) proteins of interest. The first step involves isolating the chromatin and immunoprecipitating (IP) fragements with an antibody against the protein of interest. In ChIP-seq, the immunoprecipitated DNA fragments are then sequenced, followed by identification of enriched regions of DNA or peaks. These peak calls can then be used to make biological inferences by determining the associated genomic features and/or over-represented sequence motifs.

chipseq_overview

Setting up

Since we are going to be working with this data on our remote server, O2, we first need to log onto the server.

Type in the following command with your username to login:

ssh username@o2.hms.harvard.edu

Next we will start an interactive session on O2 with 2 cores (add the -n 2):

$ srun --pty -p interactive -t 0-12:00 --mem 1G -n 1 --reservation=HBC2 /bin/bash

Make sure that your command prompt is now preceded by a character string that contains the word “compute”.

NOTE: We are using the --reservation argument during class since we have a dedicated set of computers reserved so that commands run quickly. When starting an interactive session outside of class you will need to leave out this argument. You may also want to increase othe resources (i.e. memory and number of cores) depending on what you plan on doing.

$ srun --pty -p interactive -t 0-12:00 --mem 8G -n 2 /bin/bash

Data Management

One of the most important parts of research that involves large amounts of data, is how best to manage it. We tend to prioritize the analysis, but there are many other important aspects that are often overlooked in the excitement to get a first look at new data.

The data management lifecycle displayed below, courtesy of the HMS Data Management Working Group, illustrates some things to consider beyond the data creation and analysis components:

Image aquired from the Harvard Biomedical Data Management Website

We will cover some parts of this lifecycle by talking about best practices for the Research half of the above lifecycle. Later in this workshop we will talk a little more about the data storage. For more information about the full lifecycle and more guidelines for data management, please look at the resources linked below.

Resources

Planning

You should approach your sequencing project in a very similar way to how you do a biological experiment, and ideally, begins with experimental design. We’re going to assume that you’ve already designed a beautiful sequencing experiment to address your biological question, collected appropriate samples, and that you have enough statistical power.

During this stage it is important to keep track of how the experiment was performed and clearly tracking the source of starting materials and kits used. It is also best practice to include information about any small variations within the experiment or variation relative to standard experiments.

Organization

Every computational analysis you do is going to spawn many files, and inevitability you’ll want to run some of those analyses again. For each experiment you work on and analyze data for, it is considered best practice to get organized by creating a planned storage space (directory structure).

We will start by creating a directory that we can use for the rest of the ChIP-seq session.

First, make sure that you are in your home directory.

$ cd
$ pwd

This should return /home/username.

Create a chipseq directory and change directories into it:

$ mkdir chipseq

$ cd chipseq

Now that we have a project directory, we can set up the following structure within it to keep files organized.

chipseq/
├── logs/
├── meta/
├── raw_data/
├── reference_data/
├── results/
│   ├── bowtie2/
│   └── fastqc/
└── scripts/

$ mkdir raw_data reference_data scripts logs meta

$ mkdir -p results/fastqc results/bowtie2

$ tree     # this will show you the directory structure you just created

NOTE: We are using the parents flag (-p or --parents) with mkdir to complete the file path by creating any parent directories that do not exist. In our case, we have not yet created the results directory and so since it does not exist it will be created. This flag can be very useful when scripting workflows.

This is a generic directory structure and can be tweaked based on personal preference and analysis workflow.

Now that we have the directory structure created, let’s copy over the data to perform our quality control and alignment, including our FASTQ files and reference data files:

$ cp /n/groups/hbctraining/chip-seq/raw_fastq/*fastq raw_data/

$ cp /n/groups/hbctraining/chip-seq/reference_data/chr12* reference_data/

Now we are all set up for our analysis!

File naming conventions

Another aspect of staying organized is making sure that all the filenames in an analysis are as consistent as possible, and are not things like alignment1.bam, but more like 20170823_kd_rep1_gmap-1.4.bam. This link and this slideshow have some good guidelines for file naming dos and don’ts.

Documentation

Documentation doesn’t stop at the sequencer! Keeping notes on what happened in what order, and what was done, is essential for reproducible research.

Log files

In your lab notebook, you likely keep track of the different reagents and kits used for a specific protocol. Similarly, recording information about the tools and parameters is important for documenting your computational experiments.

README files

After setting up the directory structure and when the analysis is running it is useful to have a README file within your project directory. This file will usually contain a quick one line summary about the project and any other lines that follow will describe the files/directories found within it. An example README is shown below. Within each sub-directory you can also include README files to describe the analysis and the files that were generated.

## README ##
## This directory contains data generated during the Intro to ChIP-seq course
## Date: 

There are six subdirectories in this directory:

raw_data : contains raw data
meta:  contains...
logs:
reference_data:
results:
scripts:

Homework Exercise

Exploring the example dataset

Our goal for this session is to compare the the binding profiles of Nanog and Pou5f1 (Oct4). The ChIP was performed on H1 human embryonic stem cell line (h1-ESC) cells, and sequenced using Illumina. The datasets were obtained from the HAIB TFBS ENCODE collection. These 2 transcription factors are involved in stem cell pluripotency and one of the goals is to understand their roles, individually and together, in transriptional regulation.

Two replicates were collected and each was divided into 3 aliquots for the following:

For these 6 samples, we will be using reads from only a 32.8 Mb of chromosome 12 (chr12:1,000,000-33,800,000), so we can get through the workflow in a reasonable amount of time.

This lesson has been developed by members of the teaching team at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core (HBC). These are open access materials distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.