Hyejung Won, PhD (Assistant Professor, Genetics) received a pilot award from the UNC Computational Medicine Program together with J.S. Marron, PhD (Professor, Statistics and Operations Research).
The project is titled “Statistical inference for Hi-C data – is it really there?” and proposes to apply Significance in Scale Space (SSS) to Hi-C data to capture architectural units at multiple scales. They expect that the potential for integrating visualization with statistical validation available from SSS in the Hi-C context will lead to identification of yet unexplored relationships between 3D chromatin structure and gene regulation. Moreover, appropriate adaptation will provide a novel way to compare multiple Hi-C datasets. For example, SSS can be used to identify chromatin structural differences between diseased and healthy conditions, which offers critical information about disease mechanisms.