Genome binding/occupancy profiling by high throughput sequencing
Summary
Our laboratory identified robust recurrent DNA double-strand break (DSB) cluster (“RDC”) genes in mouse neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs) by applying the high-throughput, genome-wide, translocation sequencing (HTGTS) method. Genomic alterations of most of the identified RDC-genes have been associated with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia and several are altered in brain cancer. The most robust mouse RDCs are all in genes that tend to be very long, actively transcribed and were enhanced after mild inhibition of replication stress. The common transcription and replication characteristics we observe in RDC-genes suggest that frequent RDC DSBs might be generated by collision between transcription and replication processes. However, the underlying mechanism of RDC formation is still unknown. To elucidate mechanisms that generate and resolve DSBs in these cells, we established an in vitro system of induced neural progenitor cells derived from embryonic stem cells. HTGTS bait-DSBs introduced by CRISPR/Cas9 on three mouse chromosomes identified only 5 RDC-genes in embryonic stem cells and 27 RDC-genes in the neural progenitor cells differentiated from them. All RDC-genes identified in induced neural progenitor cells belonged to the group of genes identified in primary neural and progenitor cells. These results indicate that our in vitro differentiation system is both effective and robust in terms of recapitulating our previous findings and facilitating mechanistic studies.
Overall design
We performed HTGTS-Seq libraries to assess if embryonic stem cells and embronic stem cell-derived neural progenitor cells can harbor recurrent DNA break clusters (RDCs) in vitro when subjected to replication stress.
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