An Overview of Methods for Reconstructing 3-D Chromosome and Genome Structures from Hi-C Data

Over the past decade, methods for predicting three-dimensional (3-D) chromosome and genome structures have proliferated. This has been primarily due to the development of high-throughput, next-generation chromosome conformation capture (3C) technologies, which have provided next-generation sequencing data about chromosome conformations in order to map the 3-D genome structure. The introduction of the Hi-C technique—a variant of the 3C method—has allowed researchers to extract the interaction frequency (IF) for all loci of a genome at high-throughput and at a genome-wide scale. In this review we describe, categorize, and compare the various methods developed to map chromosome and genome structures from 3C data—particularly Hi-C data. We summarize the improvements introduced by these methods, describe the approach used for method evaluation, and discuss how these advancements shape the future of genome structure construction.