3D Chromosome Regulatory Landscape of Human Pluripotent Cells [RNA-Seq]

The control of cell identity is orchestrated by transcriptional and chromatin regulators in the context of specific chromosome structures. With the recent isolation of human naive embryonic stem cells (ESCs) representative of the ground state of pluripotency, it is possible to deduce this regulatory landscape in one of the earliest stages of human development. Here we generate cohesin ChIA-PET chromatin interaction data in naive and primed human ESCs and use it to reconstruct and compare the 3D regulatory landscapes of these two stages of early human development. The results reveal shared and stage-specific regulatory landscapes of topological domains and their subdomains, which consist of CTCF-CTCF/cohesin loops and enhancer-promoter/cohesin loops. The enhancer-promoter loop data reveal that genes with key roles in pluripotency are nearly always regulated by one or more super-enhancers, and show that these genes tend to occur in insulated neighborhoods. Our results reveal the key features of the 3D regulatory landscape of early human cells that form the foundation for embryonic development. Overall design: Polyadenylated RNA-seq from naive and primed human embroynic stem cells.

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Ji X, Dadon DB, Powell BE, Fan ZP, Borges-Rivera D, Shachar S, Weintraub AS, Hnisz D, Pegoraro G, Lee TI, Misteli T, Jaenisch R, Young RA