Allele-specific binding of RNA-binding proteins reveals functional genetic variants in the RNA

Abstract

Allele-specific protein-RNA binding is an essential aspect that may reveal functional genetic variants influencing RNA processing and gene expression phenotypes. Recently, genome-wide detection of in vivo binding sites of RNA binding proteins (RBPs) is greatly facilitated by the enhanced UV crosslinking and immunoprecipitation (eCLIP) protocol. Hundreds of eCLIP-Seq data sets were generated from HepG2 and K562 cells during the ENCODE3 phase. These data afford a valuable opportunity to examine allele-specific binding (ASB) of RBPs. To this end, we developed a new computational algorithm, called BEAPR (Binding Estimation of Allele-specific Protein-RNA interaction). In identifying statistically significant ASB sites, BEAPR takes into account UV cross-linking induced sequence propensity and technical variations between replicated experiments. Using simulated data and actual eCLIP-Seq data, we show that BEAPR largely outperforms often-used methods Chi-Squared test and Fishers Exact test. Importantly, BEAPR overcomes the inherent over-dispersion problem of the other methods. Complemented by experimental validations, we demonstrate that ASB events are significantly associated with genetic regulation of splicing and mRNA abundance, supporting the usage of this method to pinpoint functional genetic variants in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Many variants with ASB patterns of RBPs were found as genetic variants with cancer or other disease relevance. About 38% of ASB variants were in linkage disequilibrium with single nucleotide polymorphisms from genome-wide association studies. Overall, our results suggest that BEAPR is an effective method to reveal ASB patterns in eCLIP and can inform functional interpretation of disease-related genetic variants.