Uncovering topologically associating domains from three-dimensional genome maps with TADGATE

Topologically associating domains (TADs) emerge as indispensable units in three-dimensional (3D) genome organization, playing a critical role in gene regulation. However, accurately identifying TADs from sparse chromatin contact maps and exploring the structural and functional elements within TADs remain challenging. To this end, we develop a graph attention auto-encoder, TADGATE, to accurately identify TADs even from ultra-sparse contact maps and generate the imputed maps while preserving or enhancing the underlying topological structures. TADGATE can capture specific attention patterns, pointing to two types of units with different characteristics in TADs. Moreover, we find that the organization of TADs is closely associated with chromatin compartmentalization, and TAD boundaries in different compartmental environments exhibit distinct biological properties. We also utilize a two-layer Hidden Markov Model to functionally annotate the TADs and their internal regions, revealing the overall properties of TADs and the distribution of the structural and functional elements within TADs. At last, we apply TADGATE to highly sparse and noisy Hi-C contact maps from 21 human tissues or cell lines, enhancing the clarity of TAD structures, investigating the nature of conserved and cell type-specific boundaries, and unveiling the cell type-specific transcriptional regulatory mechanisms associated with topological domains.