Sequential activation of transcriptional repressors promotes progenitor commitment by silencing stem cell identity genes
- University of Michigan, United States
- Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, United States
- National Institute of Genetics, Japan
- Stockholm University, Sweden
- Riken Brain Science Institute, Japan
Abstract
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.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession codes GSE152636.
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Funding
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS107496)
- Hideyuki Komori
- Cheng-Yu Lee
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS111647)
- Hideyuki Komori
- Cheng-Yu Lee
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Rives- Quinto 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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Sequential activation of transcriptional repressors promotes progenitor commitment by silencing stem cell identity genes
eLife 9:e56187.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56187
