A polymer model to infer 3D chromosome structures from Hi-C

We develop a polymer physics-based minimalist model, called heterogeneous loop model (HLM), and infer 3D organization of chromatin from Hi-C data. For a given Hi-C map, HLM is not only a computationally efficient and versatile modeling tool to model chromosome structures, but also offers analytical expressions for various experimental measurements. We demonstrate the utility of the HLM by discussing the multi-way chromatin contacts and co-segregation probability obtained from genome architecture mapping (GAM) as well as explicit 3D chromosome structure.