HiCLift: A fast and efficient tool for converting chromatin interaction data between genome assemblies

MotivationWith the continuous effort to improve the quality of human reference genome and the generation of more and more personal genomes, the conversion of genomic coordinates between genome assemblies is critical in many integrative and comparative studies. While tools have been developed for such task for linear genome signals such as ChIP-Seq, no tool exists to convert genome assemblies for chromatin interaction data, despite the importance of three-dimensional (3D) genome organization in gene regulation and disease. ResultsHere, we present HiCLift, a fast and efficient tool that can convert the genomic coordinates of chromatin contacts such as Hi-C and Micro-C from one assembly to another, including the latest T2T genome. Comparing with the strategy of directly re-mapping raw reads to a different genome, HiCLift runs on average 42 times faster (hours vs. days), while outputs nearly identical contact matrices. More importantly, as HiCLift does not need to re-map the raw reads, it can directly convert human patient sample data, where the raw sequencing reads are sometimes hard to acquire or not available. AvailabilityHiCLift is publicly available at https://github.com/XiaoTaoWang/HiCLift.