Fig. 4

Turnover TEs are hypomethylated through evolutionary time. a Methylation signature ± 2 kb around CTCF sites that help maintain orthologous loops segmented by the origin of the anchor CTCF site. b Methylation-associated and non-methylation mutational signature of individual TEs relative to its ancestral sequence in humans (mouse TE data available in Additional file 1: Figure S8). Alignments were performed using crossmatch (shown here) and Needle (details in “Methods”, results in Additional file 1: Figure S9). Error bars show one standard deviation of the means from 1000 simulations. c Schematic depicting the framework of TE-mediated CTCF binding site turnover that highlights the intimate reciprocity between the TE, genome, and epigenome, to help maintain conserved 3D genome structure