CRISPR/Cas9-mediated ASXL1 mutation in U937 cells perturbs myeloid differentiation

Purpose: Recurrent ASXL1 mutations are frequently observed in all spectrums of myeloid malignancies and published data suggests that ASXL1 mutations may be involved in leukemic transformation as a tumor suppressor. Yet the molecular mechanisms of cell desitiny regulated by ASXL1 are to be further delineated. Methods: mRNA profiles of wild-type (WT) and CRISPR/Cas9 induced ASXL1 mutated U937 cell lines were generated by next generation 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: ASXL1-mutated cells displayed impaired differentiation capacity. RNA-seq was used to compare transcriptomes of ASXL1-mutated and WT U937 cells. Transcriptom analysis revealed that ASXL1 mutations decreased the expression of genes essential to myeloid differentiation, including CYBB and CLEC5A genes, which manifested in ASXL1-MT U937 cells as perturbed potential of differentiation compared with WT cells. Also, gene set enrichment analysis revealed that ASXL1 mutations masively affected gene sets relating to cell death and survival. Conclusion: By introduction of mutations into genome using the CRISPR/Cas9 system, we established ASXL1-mutated U937 cell lines. Our results indicated that ASXL1 mutations perturbed monocytic/phagocyte differentiation, which is a hallmark of myeloid malignancies, by down regulating genes essential to myeloid differentiation, including CYBB and CLEC5A, also massively affected multiple gene sets involving in cell survival. Overall design: mRNA profiles of wild type (WT) and ASXL1 mutated U937 cell lines were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq2500

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Wu ZJ, Zhao X, Banaszak LG, Gutierrez-Rodrigues F, Keyvanfar K, Gao SG, Quinones Raffo D, Kajigaya S, Young NS