Chromatin domains with quantum annealing

Chromatin Domain Formation has recently become a topic of interest in biophys research due to its high relevance in understanding positioning of epigenic marks. Computational methods provide promising opportunities in sampling from the statistical pattern observed in nature to better understand and predict those chromatin domains. Binary quadratic models are used to model the state of nucleosome chains and find minimum energy combinations that represent possible chromatin domains. Interestingly, exactly this type of problem can not only be solved classically, but also fits into Quantum Annealing formulations and their recent hardware implementations. We investigate the Chromatin Domain Formation problem with respect to such implementations and use publicly available QA devices (by the DWave company) to solve them. We lay specific focus on the feasibility and usefulness of this approach considering scaling of devices and compare it to classical alternatives.