Enforcement of developmental lineage specificity by transcription factor Oct1
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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