SICER

SICER is a bioinformatics tool developed to identify diffuse domains of ChIP-enriched regions using genomic-scale analysis. The tool is based on the biological observation that histone modifications tend to cluster and form domains. This observation has led to the developing a method that identifies spatial clusters of signals unlikely to appear by chance, increasing sensitivity and specificity.

The SICER method pools enrichment information from neighboring nucleosomes to identify ChIP-enriched signals for histone modification profiles. This method has been shown to outperform existing methods in identifying ChIP-enriched regions for histone modification profiles. The tool is useful for data normalization, enabling quantitative comparison of levels of epigenetic modifications across cell types and growth conditions.

Chromatin states are crucial to gene regulation and cell identity. Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) coupled with high-throughput sequencing (ChIP-Seq) is becoming increasingly popular in mapping epigenetic states across genomes of diverse species. However, chromatin modification profiles can be noisy and diffuse, making identifying diffuse domains of ChIP-enriched regions challenging. The development of SICER has addressed this challenge, providing a bioinformatic tool that is useful in identifying diffuse domains of ChIP-enriched regions.