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Chromatin is a polymer complex of DNA and proteins that regulates gene expression. The three-dimensional (3D) structure and organization of chromatin controls DNA transcription and replication. High-throughput chromatin conformation capture techniques generate Hi-C maps that can provide insight into the 3D structure of chromatin. Hi-C maps can be represented as a symmetric matrix ${\mathcal{A}}_{ij}$, where each element represents the average contact probability or number of contacts between chromatin lociiandj. Previous studies have detected topologically associating domains (TADs), or self-interacting regions in ${\mathcal{A}}_{ij}$within which the contact probability is greater than that outside the region. Many algorithms have been developed to identify TADs within Hi-C maps. However, most TAD identification algorithms are unable to identify nested or overlapping TADs and for a given Hi-C map there is significant variation in the location and number of TADs identified by different methods. We develop a novel method to identify TADs, KerTAD, using a kernel-based technique from computer vision and image processing that is able to accurately identify nested and overlapping TADs. We benchmark this method against state-of-the-art TAD identification methods on both synthetic and experimental data sets. We find that the new method consistently has higher true positive rates (TPR) and lower false discovery rates (FDR) than all tested methods for both synthetic and manually annotated experimental Hi-C maps. The TPR for KerTAD is also largely insensitive to increasing noise and sparsity, in contrast to the other methods. We also find that KerTAD is consistent in the number and size of TADs identified across replicate experimental Hi-C maps for several organisms. Thus, KerTAD will improve automated TAD identification and enable researchers to better correlate changes in TADs to biological phenomena, such as enhancer-promoter interactions and disease states. 

Protein structure prediction has now been deployed widely across several different large protein sets. Large-scale domain annotation of these predictions can aid in the development of biological insights. Using our Evolutionary Classification of Protein Domains (ECOD) from experimental structures as a basis for classification, we describe the detection and cataloging of domains from 48 whole proteomes deposited in the AlphaFold Database. On average, we can provide positive classification (either of domains or other identifiable non-domain regions) for 90% of residues in all proteomes. We classified 746,349 domains from 536,808 proteins comprised of over 226,424,000 amino acid residues. We examine the varying populations of homologous groups in both eukaryotes and bacteria. In addition to containing a higher fraction of disordered regions and unassigned domains, eukaryotes show a higher proportion of repeated proteins, both globular and small repeats. We enumerate those highly populated domains that are shared in both eukaryotes and bacteria, such as the Rossmann domains, TIM barrels, and P-loop domains. Additionally, we compare the sampling of homologous groups from this whole proteome set against our stable ECOD reference and discuss groups that have been enriched by structure predictions. Finally, we discuss the implication of these results for protein target selection for future classification strategies for very large protein sets.