Project description:Our group is interested in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), in particular, TGF-beta induced EMT. TGF-beta signalling has been shown to be an important factor in the induction of EMT and it has been demonstrated that adding TGF-beta to epithelial cells in culture is a convenient way to study the process of EMT. âIn response to TGF-beta, Smad2 and 3 are activated, and form complexes with Smad4, which then regulate transcription of target genes through interactions with other DNA binding transcription factors. In the induction of EMT, the activated Smads mediate transcriptional regulation through three families of transcription factors, resulting in repression of epithelial marker gene expression and activation of mesenchymal gene expressionâ (Xu J, et al. 2009) Also investigated in this study is the role of H2A.Z in EMT. H2A.Z is an evolutionary conserved and a metazoan essential histone variant of the H2A class. Mice deficient in H2A.Z die during early development but the reason for this is unknown (Faast et al. 2001). Previously, our laboratory showed that the loss of H2A.Z in Xenpous laevis impaired cell movement required for the formation of the mesoderm and neural crest (Ridgway et al. 2004). Given that mesoderm formation is critically dependent upon EMT, we therefore wondered whether H2A.Z might be a chromatin regulator of EMT. We transfected MDCK cells with a lentiviral vector to express a construct encoding an shRNA targeting canine H2A.Z as we wanted to test the hypothesis that H2A.Z is involved in the maintenance of cellular identity and that its loss might trigger de-differentiation. In order to investigate changes in gene expression associated with TGF-beta induced epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) we performed paired end RNA-Seq of poly-A selected mRNA in untreated and TGFb-treated MDCK cells. The MDCK cell line has been extensively used as a model system for EMT because they convert fully from the epithelial to the mesenchymal state in response to TGF-beta. Gene expression profiles were also generated from MDCK cells in which H2A.Z was knocked down using shRNA. Please note that ChIP-seq data generated in conjunction to this RNA-seq data set were also deposited at ArrayExpress under accession number E-MTAB-5637 ( https://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/experiments/E-MTAB-5637 ).

Project description:Our group is interested in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), in particular, TGF-beta induced EMT. TGF-beta signalling has been shown to be an important factor in the induction of EMT and it has been demonstrated that adding TGF-beta to epithelial cells in culture is a convenient way to study the process of EMT. In response to TGF-beta, Smad2 and 3 are activated, and form complexes with Smad4, which then regulate transcription of target genes through interactions with other DNA binding transcription factors. In the induction of EMT, the activated Smads mediate transcriptional regulation through three families of transcription factors, resulting in repression of epithelial marker gene expression and activation of mesenchymal gene expression (Xu J, et al. 2009) Also investigated in this study is the role of H2A.Z in EMT. H2A.Z is an evolutionary conserved and a metazoan essential histone variant of the H2A class. Mice deficient in H2A.Z die during early development but the reason for this is unknown (Faast et al. 2001). Previously, our laboratory showed that the loss of H2A.Z in Xenpous laevis impaired cell movement required for the formation of the mesoderm and neural crest (Ridgway et al. 2004). Given that mesoderm formation is critically dependent upon EMT, we therefore wondered whether H2A.Z might be a chromatin regulator of EMT. We transfected MDCK cells with a lentiviral vector to express a construct encoding an shRNA targeting canine H2A.Z as we wanted to test the hypothesis that H2A.Z is involved in the maintenance of cellular identity and that its loss might trigger de-differentiation. In order to investigate changes in histone variant H2A.Z occupancy associated with TGF-beta induced epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) we performed H2A.Z ChIP-Seq in untreated and TGFb-treated MDCK cells. The MDCK cell line has been extensively used as a model system for EMT because they convert fully from the epithelial to the mesenchymal state in response to TGF-beta. Please note that RNA-seq data generated in conjunction to this ChIP-seq data set were also deposited at ArrayExpress under accession number E-MTAB-5628 ( https://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/experiments/E-MTAB-5628 ).

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