Abnormal RNA splicing and genomic instability after induction of DNMT3A mutations by CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing [RNA-Seq]

Purpose: DNA methyltransferase 3A (DNMT3A) mediates de novo DNA methylation. Mutations in DNMT3A are associated with hematological malignancies, most frequently acute myeloid leukemia. DNMT3A mutations are hypothesized to establish a pre-leukemic state, rendering cells vulnerable to secondary oncogenic mutations and malignant transformation. However, the mechanisms by which DNMT3A mutations contribute to leukemogenesis are not well-defined. Methods: mRNA profiles of wild-type (WT) and DNMT3A mutated k562 cell lines were generated by deep sequencing, using Illumina HiSeq2500. Sequence reads were trimmed to remove possible adapter sequences and nucleotides with poor quality at the ends. Remaining sequence reads were then aligned to the human reference genome (hg19) using Tophat2. Gene read counts were measured using FeatureCounts and FPKM values were calculated with cufflinks. edgeR was used to identify differentially expressed genes between conditions, and topGO was used for annotation (Alexa, Rahnenfuhrer, and Lengauer, 2006). Sample comparison for differential gene expression was as follows: WTblk and WT1 versus MT2, MT3, MT4, and MT5. Gene enrichment set analysis (GSEA) was conducted with KEGG, Biocarta, and Reactome pathway datasets (Subramanian et al., 2005). Results: DNMT3A-mutated cells displayed impaired differentiation capacity. RNA-seq was used to compare transcriptomes of DNMT3A-mutated and WT cells; DNMT3A ablation resulted in downregulation of genes involved in spliceosome function, causing dysfunction of RNA splicing. Unexpectedly, we observed DNMT3A-mutated cells to exhibit marked genomic instability and an impaired DNA damage response compared to WT. Conclusions: CRISPR/Cas9-mediated DNMT3A-mutated K562 cells may be used to model effects of DNMT3A mutations in human cells. Our findings implicate aberrant splicing and induction of genomic instability as potential mechanisms by which DNMT3A mutations might predispose to malignancy. Overall design: mRNA profiles of wild type (WT) and DNMT3A mutated K562 cell lines were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq2500

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Banaszak LG, Giudice V, Zhao X, Wu Z, Gao S, Hosokawa K, Keyvanfar K, Townsley DM, Gutierrez-Rodrigues F, Fernandez Ibanez MDP, Kajigaya S, Young NS