Mariner: explore the Hi-Cs

Bioinformatics. 2024 Jun 3;40(6):btae352. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae352.

Abstract

Motivation: 3D chromatin structure plays an important role in regulating gene expression and alterations to this structure can result in developmental abnormalities and disease. While genomic approaches like Hi-C and Micro-C can provide valuable insights in 3D chromatin architecture, the resulting datasets are extremely large and difficult to manipulate.

Results: Here, we present mariner, a rapid and memory efficient tool to extract, aggregate, and plot data from Hi-C matrices within the R/Bioconductor environment. Mariner simplifies the process of querying and extracting contacts from multiple Hi-C files using a parallel and block-processing approach. Modular functions allow complete workflow customization for advanced users, yet all-in-one functions are available for running the most common types of analyses. Finally, tight integration with existing Bioconductor infrastructure enables complete analysis and visualization of Hi-C data in R.

Availability and implementation: Available on GitHub at https://github.com/EricSDavis/mariner and on Bioconductor at https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/mariner.html.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Chromatin* / chemistry
  • Chromatin* / metabolism
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Genomics / methods
  • Humans
  • Software*

Substances

  • Chromatin