Stimulation of the Drosophila immune system alters genome-wide nucleosome occupancy

In eukaryotes, nucleosomes participate in all DNA-templated events by regulating access to the underlying DNA sequence. However, nucleosome dynamics during a genome response have not been well characterized [1], [2]. We stimulated Drosophila S2 cells with heat-killed Gram-negative bacteria Salmonella typhimurium, and mapped genome-wide nucleosome occupancy at high temporal resolution by MNase-seq using Illumina HiSeq 2500. We show widespread nucleosome occupancy change in S2 cells during the immune response, with the significant nucleosomal loss occurring at 4 h after stimulation. Data have been deposited to the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database repository with the dataset identifier GSE64507.