Elucidating spatiotemporal chromatin dynamics with multi-stage differential variations from Hi-C

High-throughput sequencing such as Hi-C captures spatiotemporal chromatin interactions, revealing the intricate interplays within transcriptional regulation and chromatin dynamics during cellular reprogramming and developmental processes. However, the forecast on chromatin dynamics in successive developmental stages remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of spatial and temporal patterns in Hi-C data across developmental stages. Towards such a direction, we present StarMie, a deep learning framework that integrates the spatiotemporal-aware module and the multi-stage differential variation module to predict high-throughput chromatin interactions in next developmental stages. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that StarMie outperforms existing methods and sufficiently captures discriminative spatial and temporal dependencies as well as inter-stage-level variations of chromatin interactions. Moreover, the dual importance of both spatial and temporal information in Hi-C data is observed in parameter analysis. Ablation studies also confirm the essential role of each component in StarMie. Furthermore, five cross-species case studies support StarMie's cross-species generalizability and its capability to extract universal chromatin interaction patterns in different developmental stages. In-depth analysis demonstrates that StarMie uncovers conserved genomic logic in cardiac development and disease. Overall, this work paves a new approach for exploring genome reprogramming and development through predictive modeling of Hi-C dynamics. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.