Most human DNA replication initiation is dispersed throughout the genome with only a minority within previously identified initiation zones

Carrington, Jamie T., Wilson, Rosemary H.C., de La Vega, Eduardo, Thiyagarajan, Sathish, Barker, Tom, Catchpole, Leah, Durrant, Alex, Knitlhoffer, Vanda, Watkins, Chris, Gharbi, Karim and Nieduszynski, Conrad A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2001-076X (2025) Most human DNA replication initiation is dispersed throughout the genome with only a minority within previously identified initiation zones. Genome Biology, 26 (1). ISSN 1474-7596

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Abstract

Background: The identification of sites of DNA replication initiation in mammalian cells has been challenging. Here, we present unbiased detection of replication initiation events in human cells using BrdU incorporation and single-molecule nanopore sequencing.  Results: Increases in BrdU incorporation allow us to measure DNA replication dynamics, including identification of replication initiation, fork direction, and termination on individual nanopore sequencing reads. Importantly, initiation and termination events are identified on single molecules with high resolution, throughout S-phase, genome-wide, and at high coverage at specific loci using targeted enrichment. We find a significant enrichment of initiation sites within the broad initiation zones identified by population-level studies. However, these focused initiation sites only account for ~ 20% of all identified replication initiation events. Most initiation events are dispersed throughout the genome and are missed by cell population approaches. This indicates that most initiation occurs at sites that, individually, are rarely used. These dispersed initiation sites contrast with the focused sites identified by population studies, in that they do not show a strong relationship to transcription or a particular epigenetic signature.  Conclusions: We show here that single-molecule sequencing enables unbiased detection and characterization of DNA replication initiation events, including the numerous dispersed initiation events that replicate most of the human genome.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability: Raw (fastq) and processed (bigwig files) BrdU-ip-seq Illumina data are available from NCBI GEO under accession number GSE265956 [78]. BrdU calls on aligned nascent reads (mod.bam format) and inferred replication dynamics (bed files) are available from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10827586) [79]. Code described here is available from GitHub (https://github.com/DNAReplicationLab/MammalianNanopore) together with a Zenodo repository [80].
Uncontrolled Keywords:	dnascent,ncats,origin mapping,replication origin,ultra-long,ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,genetics,cell biology ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Related URLs:	https://www.scopus.com/pages/publication...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Aug 2026 14:32
Last Modified:	11 Aug 2026 13:18
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104091
DOI:	10.1186/s13059-025-03591-w

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