Project description:Antigen presentation by cortical and medullary thymic epithelial cells (cTEC and mTEC) ensures the formation of a self-restricted and self-tolerant T cell repertoire, respectively. As such, a broad diversity of self-antigens needs to be presented by mTEC to induce T cell\u2019s self-tolerance. Even though the expression and antigen presentation of protein coding genes in mTEC has been abundantly described, little is known of the implication of allegedly noncoding regions of the genome to tolerance induction. In this study, we focused on transposable elements (TE), which have been shown to be highly expressed by mTEC.
Project description:Pleurotus ostreatus, also known as the oyster mushroom, is an active lignin decomposer in the forests. The genomes of the monokaryotic strains PC15 and PC9 have been used to characterize the content and distribution of transposable elements. This study analyzes the impact of transposable element insertions on the global transcriptome of P. ostreatus. The transcriptome of PC15 and PC9 has been analyzed in exponential growth during submerged fermentation in malt-yeast extract-sucrose medium RNAseq of two P. ostreatus strains: PC15 and PC9
Project description:Transposable elements hold regulatory functions to impact cell fate determination by controlling gene expression, which when altered can promote oncogenesis. Despite accounting for half of the human genome, little is known about the transcriptional mechanisms that confer regulatory properties to transposable elements in pluripotent, mature versus oncogenic cell states. Through positional analysis over repetitive DNA sequence of H3K27ac ChIP-seq from 32 different normal cell and tissue states, we report pluripotent stem and mature cell states-specific “regulatory transposable elements”. Those specific to pluripotent stem cells are binding sites for the pluripotency factors NANOG, SOX2 and OCT4. In mature cell and tissue states, regulatory transposable elements are docking sites for lineage-specific transcription factors, such as AR and FOXA1 in benign prostate epithelium. Expanding the positional analysis to localized prostate tumors, we show how cancer cell states remaining dependent on AR share regulatory transposable elements with pluripotent stem cells. These include regulatory transposable elements, such as Tigger3a, that serve as binding sites for AR and whose regulatory functions are required for prostate cancer cell growth. Together, our results suggest that oncogenesis differs from normal cell fate determination by hijacking pluripotent stem cells regulatory transposable elements that serve as docking sites for lineage-specific transcription factors.