Abstract

The severity of intestinal disease associated with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is variable in the patient population and this variability is partially conferred by the influence of modifier genes. Genome-wide association studies have identified SLC6A14, an electrogenic amino acid transporter, as a genetic modifier of CF-associated meconium ileus. The purpose of the current work was to determine the biological role of Slc6a14, by disrupting its expression in CF mice bearing the major mutation, F508del. We found that disruption of Slc6a14 worsened the intestinal fluid secretion defect characteristic of these mice. In vitro studies of mouse intestinal organoids revealed that exacerbation of the primary defect was associated with reduced arginine uptake across the apical membrane, with aberrant nitric oxide and cyclic GMP mediated regulation of the major CF-causing mutant protein. Together, these studies highlight the role of this apical transporter in modifying cellular nitric oxide levels, residual function of the major CF mutant and potentially, its promise as a therapeutic target.

Data availability

All of the data is presented in the submitted figures (in the article file) and supplementary file

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Saumel Ahmadi

    Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Sunny Xia

    Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Yu-Sheng Wu

    Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Michelle Di Paola

    Programme in Molecular Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Randolph Kissoon

    Programme in Molecular Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Catherine Luk

    Programme in Molecular Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  7. Fan Lin

    Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  8. Kai Du

    Programme in Molecular Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  9. Johanna Rommens

    Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  10. Christine Bear

    Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
    For correspondence
    bear@sickkids.ca
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7063-3418

Funding

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR MOP-97954,CIHR GPG-102171)

  • Fan Lin

Cystic Fibrosis Canada (CFC-1)

  • Christine Bear

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Ralph DeBerardinis, UT Southwestern Medical Center, United States

Ethics

Animal experimentation: SickKids Animal Approval: #1000037433

Version history

  1. Received: April 30, 2018
  2. Accepted: July 12, 2018
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: July 13, 2018 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: July 20, 2018 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2018, Ahmadi 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.

Metrics

  • 3,227
    views
  • 369
    downloads
  • 23
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Saumel Ahmadi
  2. Sunny Xia
  3. Yu-Sheng Wu
  4. Michelle Di Paola
  5. Randolph Kissoon
  6. Catherine Luk
  7. Fan Lin
  8. Kai Du
  9. Johanna Rommens
  10. Christine Bear
(2018)
SLC6A14, an amino acid transporter, modifies the primary CF defect in fluid secretion
eLife 7:e37963.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37963

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37963

Further reading

    1. Genetics and Genomics
    2. Neuroscience
    Bohan Zhu, Richard I Ainsworth ... Javier González-Maeso
    Research Article

    Genome-wide association studies have revealed >270 loci associated with schizophrenia risk, yet these genetic factors do not seem to be sufficient to fully explain the molecular determinants behind this psychiatric condition. Epigenetic marks such as post-translational histone modifications remain largely plastic during development and adulthood, allowing a dynamic impact of environmental factors, including antipsychotic medications, on access to genes and regulatory elements. However, few studies so far have profiled cell-specific genome-wide histone modifications in postmortem brain samples from schizophrenia subjects, or the effect of antipsychotic treatment on such epigenetic marks. Here, we conducted ChIP-seq analyses focusing on histone marks indicative of active enhancers (H3K27ac) and active promoters (H3K4me3), alongside RNA-seq, using frontal cortex samples from antipsychotic-free (AF) and antipsychotic-treated (AT) individuals with schizophrenia, as well as individually matched controls (n=58). Schizophrenia subjects exhibited thousands of neuronal and non-neuronal epigenetic differences at regions that included several susceptibility genetic loci, such as NRG1, DISC1, and DRD3. By analyzing the AF and AT cohorts separately, we identified schizophrenia-associated alterations in specific transcription factors, their regulatees, and epigenomic and transcriptomic features that were reversed by antipsychotic treatment; as well as those that represented a consequence of antipsychotic medication rather than a hallmark of schizophrenia in postmortem human brain samples. Notably, we also found that the effect of age on epigenomic landscapes was more pronounced in frontal cortex of AT-schizophrenics, as compared to AF-schizophrenics and controls. Together, these data provide important evidence of epigenetic alterations in the frontal cortex of individuals with schizophrenia, and remark for the first time on the impact of age and antipsychotic treatment on chromatin organization.

    1. Cancer Biology
    2. Genetics and Genomics
    Kevin Nuno, Armon Azizi ... Ravindra Majeti
    Research Article

    Relapse of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is highly aggressive and often treatment refractory. We analyzed previously published AML relapse cohorts and found that 40% of relapses occur without changes in driver mutations, suggesting that non-genetic mechanisms drive relapse in a large proportion of cases. We therefore characterized epigenetic patterns of AML relapse using 26 matched diagnosis-relapse samples with ATAC-seq. This analysis identified a relapse-specific chromatin accessibility signature for mutationally stable AML, suggesting that AML undergoes epigenetic evolution at relapse independent of mutational changes. Analysis of leukemia stem cell (LSC) chromatin changes at relapse indicated that this leukemic compartment underwent significantly less epigenetic evolution than non-LSCs, while epigenetic changes in non-LSCs reflected overall evolution of the bulk leukemia. Finally, we used single-cell ATAC-seq paired with mitochondrial sequencing (mtscATAC) to map clones from diagnosis into relapse along with their epigenetic features. We found that distinct mitochondrially-defined clones exhibit more similar chromatin accessibility at relapse relative to diagnosis, demonstrating convergent epigenetic evolution in relapsed AML. These results demonstrate that epigenetic evolution is a feature of relapsed AML and that convergent epigenetic evolution can occur following treatment with induction chemotherapy.