Back

State-Dependent Regulatory Compression: Chromatin Geometry Gates Information Flow in Hematopoiesis

Quiroz, R. c. N.; Quiroz, E. N.

2026-01-02 immunology
10.64898/2025.12.31.697240 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Geometric constraints in chromatin-transcription space--regions of low occupancy termed "forbidden zones"-- have been interpreted as signatures of regulatory dissociation in progenitor cells. We previously falsified this interpretation: progenitors exhibit higher, not lower, mutual information between chromatin accessibility and transcription. Here we address the consequent question: what organizational principle governs coupling under geometric constraint? Using human bone marrow multiome data (GSE194122; N=13 donors, 69,249 cells), we operationalize the Law of State-Dependent Regulatory Compression (LCR-DE) through three metrics: Gate Occupancy (GO), Coupling Efficiency (CE), and Control Selectivity (CS). Progenitors maintain conserved geometric boundaries (GO: Wilcoxon p=0.94) while exhibiting elevated coupling efficiency (CE: median 0.058 vs 0.019; p=9.77x 10-3). The lower CS in progenitors reflects distributed regulatory redundancy across multilineage programs, not absence of control, while differentiated cells exhibit crystallized, pathway-specific channeling. CE persists after cell cycle residualization (p=0.64), confirming biological rather than proliferative origin. These findings establish regulatory compression--informational channeling through selective pathways under geometric constraint--as an organizational principle of hematopoietic differentiation.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.