Figure 1

Average free energy of interaction. The genome-wide average free energy, \(\bar {F}_{k}\), as a function of genomic separation (a 600 kb window at 10 kb resolution) for free energies derived from three contact matrices (shown in legend). All show that the average free energy cost associated with forming a loop grows with the linear separation between genomic bins. Fitting a polymer model, \(\bar {F}_{k}\sim \alpha \log {|k|}\) (see Methods) gives α=1.09, 1.085 and 1.12 for the raw, raw + ICE and hierarchical matrices.