Project description:A holistic approach to examine differential gene expression profiles of transcripts relevant to the moulting process, across all moult cycle stages, was used in this study. Custom cDNA microarrays were constructed for P. pelagicus. The printed arrays contained 5000 transcripts derived from both the whole organism, and from individual organs such as the brain, eyestalk, mandibular organ and Y-organ from all moult cycle stages. A total of 556 clones were sequenced from the cDNA libraries used to construct the arrays. These cDNAs represented 217 singlets and 62 contigs, resulting in 279 unique putative genes. Moult cycle-related differential expression patterns were observed for many transcripts. Keywords: cyclic moult stage comparison of the crab Portunus pelagicus
Project description:Mitochondrial heteroplasmy, the presence of more than one mtDNA variant in a cell or individual is not as uncommon as previously thought. It is mostly due to the high mutation rate of the mtDNA and limited repair mechanisms present in the mitochondrion. The phenomenon has been studied mostly in human samples and in medical contexts. Heteroplasmy has also been researched in other species in fields such as forensics or genetic foot printing, but these studies usually focused on contained families within closely related species. Here we describe a large cross-species evaluation of heteroplasmy in mammals. We employed a novel approach to detect mitochondrial heteroplasmy in both novel and previously reported ChIP-sequencing datasets, which include concomitant mitochondrial DNA sequenced in the experiment. Here, we report novel ChIP-seq experiments for H3K4me1 and CEBPA across mammals, as well as some H3K4me3, H3K27ac and total histone H3 experiments. Most of the reported CEBPA experiments are good quality pull-downs, however the quality of many of the other experiments reported here has not been interrogated in detail. Whereas this does not affect the investigation of mitochondrial DNA pollution for the purposes of this study, both H3K4me1 and total histone H3 ChIP-seq datasets were often sequenced to relatively low depth and showed low ChIP enrichment compared to the other antibodies.
Project description:We evaluated here the physiological consequences of the generation of heteroplasmic embryos by mix of two wild type mtDNAs in the same zygote. In this animal model, mtDNA heteroplasmy is actively combated during germ-line transmission, embryonic development and somatic life of most differentiated cells. mtDNA heteroplasmy alone, even when both mtDNA types are individually non-pathogenic, causes a disease affecting mainly those tissues that are not able to reduce their heteroplasmy: heart, lung and skeletal muscle.
Project description:Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) 3243A>G tRNALeu(UUR) heteroplasmic mutation (m.3243A>G) exhibits clinically heterogeneous phenotypes. While the high mtDNA heteroplasmy exceeding a critical threshold causes mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis with stroke-like episodes (MELAS) syndrome, the low mtDNA heteroplasmy causes maternally inherited diabetes with or without deafness (MIDD) syndrome. How quantitative differences in mtDNA heteroplasmy produces distinct pathological states has remained elusive. Here we show that despite striking similarities in the energy metabolic gene expression signature, the mitochondrial bioenergetics, biogenesis and fuel catabolic functions are distinct in cells harboring low or high levels of the m.3243A>G mutation compared to wild type cells. We further demonstrate that the low heteroplasmic mutant cells exhibit a coordinate induction of transcriptional regulators of the mitochondrial biogenesis, glucose and fatty acid metabolism pathways that lack in near homoplasmic mutant cells compared to wild type cells. Altogether, these results shed new biological insights on the potential mechanisms by which low mtDNA heteroplasmy may progressively cause diabetes mellitus.
Project description:Mitochondria generate signals of adaptation that regulate nuclear genes expression via retrograde signaling. But this phenomenon is complexified when qualitatively different mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) coexist within cells. Although this cellular state of heteroplasmy leads to divergent phenotypes clinically, its consequences on cellular function and the cellular transcriptome are unknown. To interrogate this phenomenon, we generated somatic cell cybrids harboring increasing levels of a common mtDNA mutation (tRNALeu(UUR) 3243A>G) and mapped the resulting cellular phenotypes and transcriptional profiles across the complete range of heteroplasmy. Small increases in mutant mtDNAs caused relatively modest defect in mitochondrial oxidative capacity, but resulted in sharp transitions in mitochondrial ultrastructure and in the nuclear and mitochondrial transcriptomes, with the critical functional threshold corresponding to the induction of epigenetic regulatory systems. Principal component analysis underscores how each heteroplasmy level occupies a different "transcriptional space", with low levels heteroplasmy (20-30%) producing a dose-response linear progression in one direction, and mutationload of 50, 60 and 90% producing changes in the opposite direction. Hence, subtle changes in mitochondrial energetics can act through the epigenome to generate the phenotypes of the common “complex” diseases. Cells were generated by transferring the wildtype (3243A) and mutant (3243G) mtDNAs from a heteroplasmic 3243A>G patient’s lymphoblastoid cell line into 143B(TK-) mtDNA-deficient (ρo) cells and selected for transmitochondrial cybrids. Subsequent mtDNA depletion, reamplification, and cloning (Wiseman and Attardi, 1978) resulted in a series of stable cybrids harboring approximately 0, 20, 30, 50, 60, 90, and 100% 3243G mutant mtDNAs. Total RNA extracted from each cell line was then extracted, depleted of rRNA, and measured in sequenced in triplicates.
Project description:Background: Cell free DNA (cfDNA) in plasma has received increasing attention and has been studied in a broad range of clinical conditions implicating inflammation, cancer, and aging. However, few studies have focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cell free form. This study characterized the size distribution and sequence characteristics of plasma cell free mtDNA (cf mtDNA) in humans.Methods and Results: We optimized DNA isolation and next-generation sequencing library preparation protocols to better retain short DNA fragments from plasma, and applied these optimized methods to plasma samples from patients with sepsis. After massive parallel sequencing, we verified that our methods can retain substantially shorter DNA fragments than the standard isolation method, resulting in an average of 11.5 fold increase in short DNA fragments yield (DNA < 100bp). We report that cf mtDNA in plasma is highly enriched in short-size cfDNA (30 ~ 60 bp), which is much shorter than the value previously reported (~140 bp). Motivated by this unique size distribution, we size-selected short cfDNA fragments from the sequencing library, which further increased the mtDNA recovery rate by an average of 10.4 fold. Using this approach we detected mixtures of different mtDNA sequences, termed heteroplasmy, in plasma from 3 patients. In one patient who previously received bone marrow transplantation, different minor allele frequencies were observed between plasma and white blood cells (WBC) at heteroplasmic mtDNA sites, consistent with mixed-tissue origin for plasma DNA.Conclusion: mtDNA in plasma exists as very short fragments that exhibit mtDNA heteroplasmy distribution differences from that found in a single organ/tissue. This study is the first report of genome wide identification of mtDNA heteroplasmy in human plasma. Our optimized method can be used to investigate the potential utility of cf mtDNA fragments and heteroplasmy as biomarkers in various diseases.
Project description:Most humans carry a mixed population of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA heteroplasmy) affecting ~1-2% of molecules, but rapid percentage shifts occur over one generation leading to severe mitochondrial diseases. A decrease in the amount of mtDNA within the developing female germ line appears to play a role, but other sub-cellular mechanisms have been implicated. Establishing an in vitro model of early mammalian germ cell development from embryonic stem cells, here we show the reduction of mtDNA content is modulated by oxygen and reaches a nadir immediately before germ cell specification. The observed genetic bottleneck was accompanied by a decrease in mtDNA replicating foci and the segregation of heteroplasmy, which were both abolished at higher oxygen levels. Thus, differences in oxygen tension during early development can modulate mtDNA segregation, facilitating germ-line purification, and contribute to tissue-specific somatic mutation loads.
Project description:This study aimed to evaluate single nucleotide substitutions in mtDNA and analyze their correlation with inflammatory biomarkers in elderly COVID-19 patients. A total of 30 COVID-19 patients and 33 older adult controls (aged over 65 years) were enrolled. mtDNA was extracted from buffy coat samples and sequenced using a chip-based resequencing system (Affymetrix MitoChip v2.0) which detects both homoplasmic and heteroplasmic mtDNA mutations, and allows the assessment of low-level heteroplasmy. Serum concentration of IL-6, IFN-α, TNF-α and IL-10 were determined in patients by a high-sensitivity immunoassay. We found a higher burden of total heteroplasmic mutation in COVID-19 patients compared to controls with a selective increment in ND1 and COIII genes. Low-level heteroplasmy was significantly elevated in COVID-19 patients, especially in genes of the respiratory complex I. Both heteroplasmic mutation burden and low-level heteroplasmy were associated with increased levels of IL-6, TNF-α, and IFN-α.
Project description:Natural mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation plays a fundamental role in human disease and enables the clonal tracing of native human cells. While various genotyping approaches revealed mutational heterogeneity in human tissues and single cells, current methodologies are limited by scale. Here, we introduce a high-throughput, droplet-based mitochondrial single-cell Assay for Transposase Accessible Chromatin with sequencing (mtscATAC-seq) protocol and computational framework that facilitate high-confidence mtDNA mutation calling in thousands of single cells. Further, the concomitant high-quality accessible chromatin readout enables the paired inference of individual cell mtDNA heteroplasmy, clonal lineage, cell state, and accessible chromatin regulatory features. Our multi-omic analyses reveals single-cell variation in heteroplasmy of a pathologic mtDNA variant (m.8344A>G), which we tie to intra-individual chromatin variability and clonal evolution. Further, using somatic mtDNA mutations, we clonally trace thousands of hematopoietic cells in vitro and in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, linking epigenomic variability to subclonal evolution in vivo.