Project description:Early growth response gene-1 (Egr1) is a critical transcription factor involved in many important biological processes, including neuronal plasticity and memory formation. With a rapid increase in expression during the first few weeks after birth, Egr1 controls the selection, maturation and functional integration of newborn neurons. The regulation of Egr1-mediated gene expression has been shown to be under methylation control. However, Egr1 target sites and their epigenetic regulation in the nervous system remains largely unknown. In this study, we performed ChIP-seq for EGR1 in mouse frontal cortex and identified a large number of EGR1 binding sites with their cell-type specific methylation patterns established during postnatal frontal cortex development. More specifically, the CpG dinucleotides within these EGR1 binding sites become hypo-methylated in mature neurons but remain heavily methylated in glia. We further demonstrated that EGR1 recruits a DNA demethylase TET1 to remove DNA methylation at EGR1 binding sites and activate downstream genes. In addition, we found that the frontal cortexes from knockout mice with the loss of Egr1 or Tet1 share strikingly similar profiles in both gene expression and DNA methylation. In summary, our study reveals Egr1 as a key mediator for gene-environment interactions shaping brain methylome together with Tet1 during early postnatal development and provides an important new insight into how early life experience may shape the brain methylome. This SuperSeries is composed of the SubSeries listed below.
Project description:With anti-TET1 immunoprecipitated chromatin from mouse frontal cortices, we generated TET1 binding maps with 4496 high-confidence peaks and approximately 90% of TET1 peaks were within intergenic regions.
Project description:With anti-EGR1 immunoprecipitated chromatin from mouse prefrontal cortices, we generated EGR1 binding maps with 12, 014 high-confidence peaks. Approximately 81% of EGR1 peaks were within genic regions or nearby promoters, and over 45% EGR1 peaks were in the proximal promoter regions within 1 kb from transcription starting sites.
Project description:Global gene expression profile of Tet1 knocout cortex or hippocampus is compared to wild-type cortex or hippocampus. All mice used are naM-CM-/ve and of mixed 129 C57BL6 backgound. Tet1 KO in brain cortex and hippocampus
Project description:Analysis of early stages of alcohol dependence at the gene expression level. The hypothesis tested in the present study was that ethanol-treatment impact gene expression in a mouse model of high ethanol consumption. Results provide important information of genes and pathways being affected by ethanol actions in the mouse frontal cortex. Total RNA obtained from frontal cortex from mice treated with 20% ethanol solution for 20 days. Control group is composed of untreated animals. Frontal cortex (FCtx) tissue was dissected to produce a 2-mm coronal section from the most rostral portion of the mouse brain devoid of olfactory bulbs (coordinates Bregma +1.56 to +3.56). The dorsal part of this coronal section, cut immediately above the forceps minor of the corpus callosum as the anatomical landmark, was used for RNA extraction. This section of the cortex is mostly composed of frontal associated cortex (FrA), cingulate cortex area 1 (Cg1), prelimbic cortex (PrL), and primary (M1) and secondary (M2) motor cortices, as depicted in the mouse brain atlas (Franklin and Paxinos 2007). Samples from both alcohol-treated and control groups were always included in each batch of extracted RNA. Total RNA was extracted using the mirVanaM-BM-. miRNA Isolation kit (Ambion, Austin, TX) according to the manufacturerM-bM-^@M-^Ys instructions. Yield and quality of the total RNA preparation was determined using the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent, Palo Alto, CA). For mRNA expression profiling, biotin-labeled cRNA was prepared using Illumina TotalPrep RNA Amplification kit (Ambion, Austin, TX) and then hybridized to Illumina MouseRef-8 v2.0 Expression BeadChips (Illumina, San Diego, CA). The quality of the Illumina bead summary data was assessed using the Bioconductor packages Lumi and arrayQualityMetrics. Data preprocessing included variance stabilization and quantile normalization using the Lumi package. Statistical analysis comparing ethanol-treated and control groups was performed using the Bioconductor package limma, which implements an empirical Bayes approach in R (Smyth 2005). False discovery rate (FDR) was assessed using the Benjamini-Hochberg method.