ChromHMM: automating chromatin-state discovery and characterization

Abstract

ChromHMM outputs both the learned chromatin-state model parameters and the chromatin-state assignments for each genomic position. The learned emission and transition parameters are returned in both text and image format (Fig. 1), automatically grouping chromatin states with similar emission parameters or proximal genomic locations, although a user-specified reordering can also be used (Supplementary Figs. 12 and Supplementary Note). ChromHMM enables the study of the likely biological roles of each chromatin state based on enrichment in diverse external annotations and experimental data, shown as heat maps and tables (Fig. 1), both for direct genomic overlap and at various distances from a chromatin state.