SUMMARY: Single molecule footprinting profiles the heterogeneity of TF occupancy at cis-regulatory elements across cell populations at unprecedented resolution. The single molecule nature of the data in principle allows for observing the footprint of individual transcription factors and nucleosomes. However, we currently lack algorithms to quantify these occupancy patterns of chromatin binding factors in an automated way and without prior assumptions on their genomic location. Here we present FootprintCharter, an unsupervised tool to detect and quantify footprints for transcription factors (TFs) and nucleosomes from single molecule footprinting data. After detection, TF footprints can be labeled with orthogonal motif annotations provided by the user. FootprintCharter allows for the quantification of complex molecular states such as positioning of unphased nucleosomes and combinatorial co-binding of multiple TFs. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: FootprintCharter is freely available on Bioconductor with version 2.2.0 of https://bioconductor.org/packages/SingleMoleculeFootprinting through the functions FootprintCharter, PlotFootprints, and Plot_FootprintCharter_SM.

MOTIVATION: The vast majority of the many thousands of disease-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) lie in the non-coding part of the genome. They are likely to affect regulatory elements, such as enhancers and promoters, rather than the function of a protein. To understand the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic diseases, it is therefore increasingly important to study the effect of a SNP on nearby molecular traits such as chromatin or transcription factor binding. RESULTS: We developed SNPhood, a user-friendly Bioconductor R package to investigate, quantify and visualise the local epigenetic neighbourhood of a set of SNPs in terms of chromatin marks or TF binding sites using data from NGS experiments. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: SNPhood is publicly available and maintained as an R Bioconductor package at http://bioconductor.org/packages/SNPhood/ CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.