Rocky 2021

OP-08
TADMaster: A Comprehensive Web-based Tool for Analysis of Topologically Associated Domain Detection Methods

Presenting Author: Oluwatosin Oluwadare, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA

Co-Author(s):
Sean Higgins, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Allen Westcott, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Victor Akpokiro, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Abstract:Chromosome conformation capture and its derivatives have provided a substantial amount of genetic data for understanding the structure of chromosomes. The latter has led to the identification of topologically associated domains (TADs) that play a critical role in the local structure and function of a chromosome. There are numerous computational methods for identifying these regions, however, it is not trivial to directly compare the results of one method to another. In this work, we propose a web-based visualization and analysis suite to directly compare the outputs between two or more TAD identifying methods called TADMaster. This includes a direct analysis via a heat map of the identified regions; a quantitative comparison of the size/number of identified regions; the boundaries of the identified regions; the totality of the domains; and the amount of domain overlap are also provided via graphs for comparison between methods. Finally, methods are clustered using principal component analysis and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding to provide additional metrics for comparison between methods. In addition, TADMaster also provides multiple normalizations and state-of-the-art methods for identifying TADs in a multitude of various Hi-C data formats. Alternatively, users can also submit their own identified TADs from any TAD detection algorithm for comparison. Ultimately, TADMaster will prove to be a valuable tool for researchers working or exploring the chromatin genomic research area for understanding the hidden organization and hierarchical organization of the chromosome or genome structure. TADMaster can be accessed at http://tadmaster.io.