A scalable platform for the development of cell-type-specific viral drivers
- Harvard Medical School, United States
Abstract
Enhancers are the primary DNA regulatory elements that confer cell type specificity of gene expression. Recent studies characterizing individual enhancers have revealed their potential to direct heterologous gene expression in a highly cell-type-specific manner. However, it has not yet been possible to systematically identify and test the function of enhancers for each of the many cell types in an organism. We have developed PESCA, a scalable and generalizable method that leverages ATAC- and single-cell RNA-sequencing protocols, to characterize cell-type-specific enhancers that should enable genetic access and perturbation of gene function across mammalian cell types. Focusing on the highly heterogeneous mammalian cerebral cortex, we apply PESCA to find enhancers and generate viral reagents capable of accessing and manipulating a subset of somatostatin-expressing cortical interneurons with high specificity. This study demonstrates the utility of this platform for developing new cell-type-specific viral reagents, with significant implications for both basic and translational research.
Data availability
Sequencing data had been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE136802
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A scalable platform for the development of cell-type-specific viral driversNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE136802.
Article and author information
Author details
Michael E Greenberg
Funding
National Institutes of Health (RF1MH11408101)
- Michael E Greenberg
National Institutes of Health (5T32AG000222-23)
- Sinisa Hrvatin
National Institutes of Health (T32GM007753)
- M Aurel Nagy
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 (#IS00000074-3) of Harvard Medical School. All surgery was performed under isoflurane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2019, Hrvatin 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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A scalable platform for the development of cell-type-specific viral drivers
eLife 8:e48089.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48089
Further reading
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- Genetics and Genomics
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- Computational and Systems Biology
- Genetics and Genomics
Enhancers and promoters are classically considered to be bound by a small set of transcription factors (TFs) in a sequence-specific manner. This assumption has come under increasing skepticism as the datasets of ChIP-seq assays of TFs have expanded. In particular, high-occupancy target (HOT) loci attract hundreds of TFs with often no detectable correlation between ChIP-seq peaks and DNA-binding motif presence. Here, we used a set of 1003 TF ChIP-seq datasets (HepG2, K562, H1) to analyze the patterns of ChIP-seq peak co-occurrence in combination with functional genomics datasets. We identified 43,891 HOT loci forming at the promoter (53%) and enhancer (47%) regions. HOT promoters regulate housekeeping genes, whereas HOT enhancers are involved in tissue-specific process regulation. HOT loci form the foundation of human super-enhancers and evolve under strong negative selection, with some of these loci being located in ultraconserved regions. Sequence-based classification analysis of HOT loci suggested that their formation is driven by the sequence features, and the density of mapped ChIP-seq peaks across TF-bound loci correlates with sequence features and the expression level of flanking genes. Based on the affinities to bind to promoters and enhancers we detected five distinct clusters of TFs that form the core of the HOT loci. We report an abundance of HOT loci in the human genome and a commitment of 51% of all TF ChIP-seq binding events to HOT locus formation thus challenging the classical model of enhancer activity and propose a model of HOT locus formation based on the existence of large transcriptional condensates.
