bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/812552; this version posted October 21, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Integrating Enhancer RNA signatures with diverse omics data identifies characteristics of transcription initiation in pancreatic islets Arushi Varshney1, Yasuhiro Kyono2, Venkateswaran Ramamoorthi Elangovan1, Collin Wang1, Michael R. Erdos3, Narisu Narisu3, Ricardo D'Oliveira Albanus1, Peter Orchard1, Michael L. Stitzel4, Francis S. Collins3, Jacob O. Kitzman1,5, Stephen C. J. Parker1,5,* 1 Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 2 Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA 3 National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA 4 The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, Farmington, CT, USA 5 Department of Human Genetics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA * Corresponding author
[email protected] Abstract Identifying active regulatory elements and their molecular signatures is critical to understand gene regulatory mechanisms and subsequently better delineating biological mechanisms of complex diseases and traits. Studies have shown that active enhancers can be transcribed into enhancer RNA (eRNA). Here, we identify actively transcribed regulatory elements in human pancreatic islets by generating eRNA profiles using cap analysis of gene expression (CAGE) across 70 islet samples. We identify 9,954 clusters of CAGE tag transcription start sites (TSS) or tag clusters (TCs) in islets, ~20% of which are islet-specific when compared to CAGE TCs across publicly available tissues.