Enforcement of developmental lineage specificity by transcription factor Oct1
- Celgene Corporation, United States
- The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, United States
- University of Utah School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
Embryonic stem cells co-express Oct4 and Oct1, a related protein with similar DNA binding specificity. To study the role of Oct1 in ESC pluripotency and transcriptional control, we constructed germline and inducible-conditional Oct1 deficient ESC lines. ESCs lacking Oct1 show normal appearance, self-renewal and growth, but manifest defects upon differentiation. They fail to form beating cardiomyocytes, generate neurons poorly, form small, poorly differentiated teratomas, and cannot generate chimeric mice. Upon RA-mediated differentiation, Oct1 deficient cells induce lineage-appropriate developmentally poised genes poorly while lineage-inappropriate genes, including extra-embryonic genes, are inappropriately expressed. In ESCs Oct1 co-occupies a specific set of targets with Oct4, but does not occupy differentially expressed developmental targets. Instead, Oct1 occupies these targets as cells differentiate and Oct4 declines. These results identify a dynamic interplay between Oct1 and Oct4, in particular during the critical window immediately after loss of pluripotency when cells make the earliest developmental fate decisions.
Data availability
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Enforcement of developmental lineage specificity by transcription factor Oct1Publicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE85063).
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Author details
Funding
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R01AI100873)
- Dean Tantin
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#14-06015) of the University of Utah. Every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2017, Shen et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Enforcement of developmental lineage specificity by transcription factor Oct1
eLife 6:e20937.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20937
Further reading
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- Developmental Biology
Cells called alveolar myofibroblasts, which have a central role in the development of the lung after birth, receive an orchestrated input from a range of different signaling pathways.
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- Developmental Biology
Premature infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) have impaired alveolar gas exchange due to alveolar simplification and dysmorphic pulmonary vasculature. Advances in clinical care have improved survival for infants with BPD, but the overall incidence of BPD remains unchanged because we lack specific therapies to prevent this disease. Recent work has suggested a role for increased transforming growth factor-beta (TGFβ) signaling and myofibroblast populations in BPD pathogenesis, but the functional significance of each remains unclear. Here, we utilize multiple murine models of alveolar simplification and comparative single-cell RNA sequencing to identify shared mechanisms that could contribute to BPD pathogenesis. Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals a profound loss of myofibroblasts in two models of BPD and identifies gene expression signatures of increased TGFβ signaling, cell cycle arrest, and impaired proliferation in myofibroblasts. Using pharmacologic and genetic approaches, we find no evidence that increased TGFβ signaling in the lung mesenchyme contributes to alveolar simplification. In contrast, this is likely a failed compensatory response, since none of our approaches to inhibit TGFβ signaling protect mice from alveolar simplification due to hyperoxia while several make simplification worse. In contrast, we find that impaired myofibroblast proliferation is a central feature in several murine models of BPD, and we show that inhibiting myofibroblast proliferation is sufficient to cause pathologic alveolar simplification. Our results underscore the importance of impaired myofibroblast proliferation as a central feature of alveolar simplification and suggest that efforts to reverse this process could have therapeutic value in BPD.
