In cell differentiation, a cell of a less specialized type becomes one of a
more specialized type, even though all cells have the same genome.
Transcription factors and epigenetic marks like histone modifications can play
a significant role in the differentiation process. In this paper, we present a
simple analysis of cell types and differentiation paths using phylogenetic
inference based on ChIP-Seq histone modification data. We propose new data
representation techniques and new distance measures for ChIP-Seq data and use
these together with standard phylogenetic inference methods to build
biologically meaningful trees that indicate how diverse types of cells are
related. We demonstrate our approach on H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 data for 37 and 13
types of cells respectively, using the dataset to explore various issues
surrounding replicate data, variability between cells of the same type, and
robustness. The promising results we obtain point the way to a new approach to
the study of cell differentiation.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on
Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013
