Artificial Intelligence to reach the far side of chromosomes

The 3D structure of chromosomes is finely organized to ensure major biological functions such as replication and transcriptional regulation. To study it in detail, so-called contact techniques (3C, Hi-C) are developed in parallel with microscopy, which trap fragments of chromosomes in physical contact and allow the average 3D structure of a chromosome to be deduced. These techniques generate millions of pairs of small sequences (~ 50 nucleotides), a certain proportion of which cannot be located directly due to their repetition in the sequence of the reference genome (several alignments are possible). We propose the project called Apollo, which aims to use numerical simulation, machine learning and statistical methods to predict the positions of these currently missing repeating sequences and thus reveal the hidden side of chromosomes.