CRISPR reveals a distal murine-specific enhancer required for Sox2 expression in mouse embryonic stem cells
Transcriptomics Dataset
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General Information
AccessionGSE60763
TitleCRISPR reveals a distal murine-specific enhancer required for Sox2 expression in mouse embryonic stem cells
DescriptionThe pluripotency of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) is maintained by a small group of master transcription factors including Oct4, Sox2 and Nanog. These core factors form a regulatory circuit controlling the transcription of a number of pluripotency factors including themselves. Although a lot of previous studies have identified key factors regulating this core network in trans, the contribution of cis-regulatory DNA sequences on the transcription of these key pluripotency factors remains elusive. We analyzed epigenomic data within the 1.5 Mb gene-desert regions around Sox2 gene and predicted only one 13kb-long enhancer located 100kb downstream of Sox2 in mouse ES cells. This enhancer is occupied by Oct4, Sox2, Nanog, and mediator complex and forms a long-range DNA looping to Sox2 locus. We hypothesized that this enhancer is critical for Sox2 gene expression and tested this hypothesis by deleting this entire 13-kb enhancer with a simple highly-efficient double-excision CRISPR strategy. Allele-specific of Sox2 transcripts in heterozygous enhancer-deletion clones showed that the enhancer affects expression through a cis-acting mechanism. Strikingly, although this distal enhancer is not conserved in other mammals including human, it is responsible for over 90%% of Sox2 expression in mouse ESCs. Taken together, our results provide direct evidence that in mouse ESCs, Sox2 transcription is primarily driven by a species-specific distal enhancer, which may provide new perspectives explaining the physiological difference between human and mouse ES cells.
Landing Pagehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE60763
RepositoryGene Expression Omnibus
Tools used to analyze the dataset

Dataset Accession

ARCHS4
Published September 2017
ARCHS4 provides access to gene counts from HiSeq 2000 and HiSeq 2500 platforms for human and mouse experiments from GEO ...
4645
Clustergrammer
Published October 2017
Web-based tool for visualizing and analyzing high-dimensional data as interactive and shareable heatmaps
4645
Canned Analyses generated with the dataset

Dataset Accession
Tool Name

Interactive heatmap visualization of RNA-seq dataset GSE60763
Highly interactive web-based heatmap visualization of the top 500 most variable genes in t...
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