Application of ATAC-Seq for genome-wide analysis of the chromatin state at single myofiber resolution
Abstract
Myofibers are the main components of skeletal muscle, which is the largest tissue in the body. Myofibers are highly adaptive and can be altered under different biological and disease conditions. Therefore, transcriptional and epigenetic studies on myofibers are crucial to discover how chromatin alterations occur in the skeletal muscle under different conditions. However, due to the heterogenous nature of skeletal muscle, studying myofibers in isolation proves to be a challenging task. Single cell sequencing has permitted the study of the epigenome of isolated myonuclei. While this provides sequencing with high dimensionality, the sequencing depth is lacking, which makes comparisons between different biological conditions difficult. Here we report the first implementation of single myofiber ATAC-Seq, which allows for the sequencing of an individual myofiber at a depth sufficient for peak calling and for comparative analysis of chromatin accessibility under various physiological and disease conditions. Application of this technique revealed significant differences in chromatin accessibility between resting and regenerating myofibers, as well as between myofibers from a mouse model of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (mdx) and wild type (WT) counterparts. This technique can lead to a wide application in the identification of chromatin regulatory elements and epigenetic mechanisms in muscle fibers during development and in muscle-wasting diseases.
Data availability
The data discussed in this study have been deposited in NCBI's Gene Expression Omnibus and are accessible through GEO Series accession numbers GSE173676 and GSE171534
-
ATAC-Seq of single myofibersNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE173676.
-
ATAC-Seq of young and aged satellite cellsNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE171534.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Vahab D Soleimani
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 that were performed on animals were approved by the McGill University Animal Care Committee (UACC), protocol #7512
Copyright
© 2022, Sahinyan 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
-
- 6,541
- views
-
- 556
- downloads
-
- 17
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
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)
Further reading
-
- Genetics and Genomics
N6-methyladenosine (m6A) in eukaryotic RNA is an epigenetic modification that is critical for RNA metabolism, gene expression regulation, and the development of organisms. Aberrant expression of m6A components appears in a variety of human diseases. RNA m6A modification in Drosophila has proven to be involved in sex determination regulated by Sxl and may affect X chromosome expression through the MSL complex. The dosage-related effects under the condition of genomic imbalance (i.e. aneuploidy) are related to various epigenetic regulatory mechanisms. Here, we investigated the roles of RNA m6A modification in unbalanced genomes using aneuploid Drosophila. The results showed that the expression of m6A components changed significantly under genomic imbalance, and affected the abundance and genome-wide distribution of m6A, which may be related to the developmental abnormalities of aneuploids. The relationships between methylation status and classical dosage effect, dosage compensation, and inverse dosage effect were also studied. In addition, we demonstrated that RNA m6A methylation may affect dosage-dependent gene regulation through dosage-sensitive modifiers, alternative splicing, the MSL complex, and other processes. More interestingly, there seems to be a close relationship between MSL complex and RNA m6A modification. It is found that ectopically overexpressed MSL complex, especially the levels of H4K16Ac through MOF, could influence the expression levels of m6A modification and genomic imbalance may be involved in this interaction. We found that m6A could affect the levels of H4K16Ac through MOF, a component of the MSL complex, and that genomic imbalance may be involved in this interaction. Altogether, our work reveals the dynamic and regulatory role of RNA m6A modification in unbalanced genomes, and may shed new light on the mechanisms of aneuploidy-related developmental abnormalities and diseases.
-
- Genetics and Genomics
The DYRK1A enzyme is a pivotal contributor to frequent and severe episodes of otitis media in Down syndrome, positioning it as a promising target for therapeutic interventions.