Parallel functional testing identifies enhancers active in early postnatal mouse brain
- University of California, Davis, United States
- Michigan State University, United States
- University of Pittsburgh, United States
Abstract
Enhancers are cis-regulatory elements that play critical regulatory roles in modulating developmental transcription programs and driving cell-type specific and context-dependent gene expression in the brain. The development of massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) has enabled high-throughput functional screening of candidate DNA sequences for enhancer activity. Tissue-specific screening of in vivo enhancer function at scale has the potential to greatly expand our understanding of the role of non-coding sequences in development, evolution, and disease. Here, we adapted a self-transcribing regulatory element MPRA strategy for delivery to early postnatal mouse brain via recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV). We identified and validated putative enhancers capable of driving reporter gene expression in mouse forebrain, including regulatory elements within an intronic CACNA1C linkage disequilibrium block associated with risk in neuropsychiatric disorder genetic studies. Paired screening and single enhancer in vivo functional testing, as we show here, represents a powerful approach towards characterizing regulatory activity of enhancers and understanding how enhancer sequences organize gene expression in the brain.
Data availability
All supplementary information, including links to raw and processed data, can be found at the Nord Lab Resources page (https://nordlab.faculty.ucdavis.edu/resources/). Software can be found at the Nord Lab Git Repository (https://github.com/NordNeurogenomicsLab/) and https://github.com/NordNeurogenomicsLab/Publications/tree/master/Lambert_eLIFE_2021. Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE172058.
-
Parallel functional testing identifies enhancers active in early postnatal mouse brainNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE19373 GSE172058.
-
Roadmap Consolidated Peak DatasetGEO GSM530651, GSM595913, GSM595920, GSM595922, GSM595923, GSM595926, GSM595928, GSM806934, GSM806939, GSM621457, GSM706999, GSM806935, GSM621427, GSM707000, GSM806936, GSM621393, GSM707001, GSM806937, GSM621410, GSM707002, GSM806938.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R35GM119831)
- Jason T Lambert
National Institutes of Health (T32-GM008799)
- Linda Su-Feher
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were performed in accordance with the ARVO statement for the Use of Animals in Ophthalmic and Vision Research and were approved by the University of California Animal Care and Use Committee (AUP #R200-0913BC). Surgery was performed under anesthesia, and all efforts were made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2021, Lambert 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
-
- 3,960
- views
-
- 389
- downloads
-
- 26
- 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)
Parallel functional testing identifies enhancers active in early postnatal mouse brain
eLife 10:e69479.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69479
Further reading
-
- Genetics and Genomics
- Neuroscience
Continued methodological advances have enabled numerous statistical approaches for the analysis of summary statistics from genome-wide association studies. Genetic correlation analysis within specific regions enables a new strategy for identifying pleiotropy. Genomic regions with significant ‘local’ genetic correlations can be investigated further using state-of-the-art methodologies for statistical fine-mapping and variant colocalisation. We explored the utility of a genome-wide local genetic correlation analysis approach for identifying genetic overlaps between the candidate neuropsychiatric disorders, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and schizophrenia. The correlation analysis identified several associations between traits, the majority of which were loci in the human leukocyte antigen region. Colocalisation analysis suggested that disease-implicated variants in these loci often differ between traits and, in one locus, indicated a shared causal variant between ALS and AD. Our study identified candidate loci that might play a role in multiple neuropsychiatric diseases and suggested the role of distinct mechanisms across diseases despite shared loci. The fine-mapping and colocalisation analysis protocol designed for this study has been implemented in a flexible analysis pipeline that produces HTML reports and is available at: https://github.com/ThomasPSpargo/COLOC-reporter.
-
- Chromosomes and Gene Expression
- Genetics and Genomics
The enhancer-promoter looping model, in which enhancers activate their target genes via physical contact, has long dominated the field of gene regulation. However, the ubiquity of this model has been questioned due to evidence of alternative mechanisms and the lack of its systematic validation, primarily owing to the absence of suitable experimental techniques. In this study, we present a new MNase-based proximity ligation method called MChIP-C, allowing for the measurement of protein-mediated chromatin interactions at single-nucleosome resolution on a genome-wide scale. By applying MChIP-C to study H3K4me3 promoter-centered interactions in K562 cells, we found that it had greatly improved resolution and sensitivity compared to restriction endonuclease-based C-methods. This allowed us to identify EP300 histone acetyltransferase and the SWI/SNF remodeling complex as potential candidates for establishing and/or maintaining enhancer-promoter interactions. Finally, leveraging data from published CRISPRi screens, we found that most functionally verified enhancers do physically interact with their cognate promoters, supporting the enhancer-promoter looping model.
