TY - JOUR TI - Sequential activation of transcriptional repressors promotes progenitor commitment by silencing stem cell identity genes AU - Rives-Quinto, Noemi AU - Komori, Hideyuki AU - Ostgaard, Cyrina M AU - Janssens, Derek H AU - Kondo, Shu AU - Dai, Qi AU - Moore, Adrian W AU - Lee, Cheng-Yu A2 - Desplan, Claude A2 - Banerjee, Utpal VL - 9 PY - 2020 DA - 2020/11/26 SP - e56187 C1 - eLife 2020;9:e56187 DO - 10.7554/eLife.56187 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56187 AB - Stem cells that indirectly generate differentiated cells through intermediate progenitors drives vertebrate brain evolution. Due to a lack of lineage information, how stem cell functionality, including the competency to generate intermediate progenitors, becomes extinguished during progenitor commitment remains unclear. Type II neuroblasts in fly larval brains divide asymmetrically to generate a neuroblast and a progeny that commits to an intermediate progenitor (INP) identity. We identified Tailless (Tll) as a master regulator of type II neuroblast functional identity, including the competency to generate INPs. Successive expression of transcriptional repressors functions through Hdac3 to silence tll during INP commitment. Reducing repressor activity allows re-activation of Notch in INPs to ectopically induce tll expression driving supernumerary neuroblast formation. Knocking-down hdac3 function prevents downregulation of tll during INP commitment. We propose that continual inactivation of stem cell identity genes allows intermediate progenitors to stably commit to generating diverse differentiated cells during indirect neurogenesis. KW - neuroblast KW - intermediate progenitors KW - neural stem cells KW - Notch signaling KW - neurogenesis JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -