Project description:Psychological stress reactions can stimulate mammalian immune functions due to yet unknown mechanisms. We hypothesized that these involve massive post-stress alternative splicing modulations in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). RNA was extracted from PBMCs of BALB/C mice following unpredictable repeated foot shocks. Among the tested group, five mice exhibiting the maximal circulation glucocorticoids were selected for the stress group. PBMC RNA of 5 BALB/C mice served as the control group. Through linear regression analysis of all the reciprocal junction pairs represented on the microarrays and the Ensembl database, 496 alternative splicing events were detected. The stressed mice showed 65% exon skipping out of total splicing event changes compared to controls. The detected genes exhibited functional enrichment (through DAVID EASE analysis) in alternative splicing (47%), cellular response to stress (12%), lymphocyte activation (8%), stress-induced proteins (2%) and heat-shock-induced proteins (2%). Specifically, exon skipping modifications in the Hnrnph1 and CLK1 splicing-related transcripts were accompanied by stress-inducible inclusions in the immune response-related IRF-1 gene. Our findings demonstrate dependence on exon skipping and independence from glucocorticoid and innate immunity for the stress-inducible exacerbation of immunity and open new venues for preventing post-trauma inflammatory crisis.
Project description:Although the function of DNA methylation in gene promoter regions is well established in transcriptional repression, the function of the evolutionarily conserved widespread distribution of DNA methylation in gene body regions remains incompletely understood. Here, we show that DNA methylation is enriched in included alternatively spliced exons (ASEs) and inhibiting DNA methylation results in aberrant splicing of ASEs. The methyl-CpG binding protein MeCP2 is enriched in included ASEs, particularly those that are also highly DNA methylated, and inhibition of DNA methylation disrupts specific targeting of MeCP2 to exons. Interestingly, ablation of MeCP2 results in increased nucleosome acetylation and aberrant skipping events of ASEs. We further show that inhibition of histone deacetylases leads to a highly significant overlap of exon skipping events caused by knocking-down MeCP2. Together, our data indicate that intragenic DNA methylation operates in exon definition to modulate alternative splicing and can enhance exon recognition via recruitment of the multifunctional protein MeCP2, which thereby maintains local histone hypoacetylation through its established interaction with HDACs. MeCP2 ChIP-Seq in IMR90 and HCT116 cells
