Characterisation of cis-regulatory elements and genome wide enhancer prediction in Heliconiini butterflies

A cis-regulatory atlas for Heliconius wing development integrates ATAC-seq and H3K27ac/H3K4me3 to map promoters and enhancers, showing temporal divergence and conserved forewing–hindwing dynamics.

• Why it matters: Limited multiomic resources in non-model organisms constrain understanding of how cis-regulatory dynamics shape phenotypic wing patterning variation during development.
• What they did: The study re-analysed multiomic datasets to annotate promoter/enhancer peak sets and trained a convolutional neural network for sequence-based enhancer prediction.
• The result: The model achieved test AUROC 0.909 and AUPRC 0.913, and enhancer predictions across 34 Heliconiini assemblies were enriched in accessible chromatin and conserved non-exonic elements.