Quartet-based inference of cell differentiation trees from ChIP-Seq histone modification data.

Understanding cell differentiation-the process of generation of distinct cell-types-plays a pivotal role in developmental and evolutionary biology. Transcriptomic information and epigenetic marks are useful to elucidate hierarchical developmental relationships among cell-types. Standard phylogenetic approaches such as maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood and neighbor joining have previously been applied to ChIP-Seq histone modification data to infer cell-type trees, showing how diverse types of cells are related.