scholarly journals Olfactory expression of trace amine-associated receptors requires cooperative cis-acting enhancers

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ami Shah ◽  
Madison Ratkowski ◽  
Alessandro Rosa ◽  
Paul Feinstein ◽  
Thomas Bozza

AbstractOlfactory sensory neurons express a large family of odorant receptors (ORs) and a small family of trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs). While both families are subject to so-called singular expression (expression of one allele of one gene), the mechanisms underlying TAAR gene choice remain obscure. Here, we report the identification of two conserved sequence elements in the mouse TAAR cluster (T-elements) that are required for TAAR gene expression. We observed that cell-type-specific expression of a TAAR-derived transgene required either T-element. Moreover, deleting either element reduced or abolished expression of a subset of TAAR genes, while deleting both elements abolished olfactory expression of all TAARs in cis with the mutation. The T-elements exhibit several features of known OR enhancers but also contain highly conserved, unique sequence motifs. Our data demonstrate that TAAR gene expression requires two cooperative cis-acting enhancers and suggest that ORs and TAARs share similar mechanisms of singular expression.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devanshi Patel ◽  
Xiaoling Zhang ◽  
John J. Farrell ◽  
Jaeyoon Chung ◽  
Thor D. Stein ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTBecause regulation of gene expression is heritable and context-dependent, we investigated AD-related gene expression patterns in cell-types in blood and brain. Cis-expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping was performed genome-wide in blood from 5,257 Framingham Heart Study (FHS) participants and in brain donated by 475 Religious Orders Study/Memory & Aging Project (ROSMAP) participants. The association of gene expression with genotypes for all cis SNPs within 1Mb of genes was evaluated using linear regression models for unrelated subjects and linear mixed models for related subjects. Cell type-specific eQTL (ct-eQTL) models included an interaction term for expression of “proxy” genes that discriminate particular cell type. Ct-eQTL analysis identified 11,649 and 2,533 additional significant gene-SNP eQTL pairs in brain and blood, respectively, that were not detected in generic eQTL analysis. Of note, 386 unique target eGenes of significant eQTLs shared between blood and brain were enriched in apoptosis and Wnt signaling pathways. Five of these shared genes are established AD loci. The potential importance and relevance to AD of significant results in myeloid cell-types is supported by the observation that a large portion of GWS ct-eQTLs map within 1Mb of established AD loci and 58% (23/40) of the most significant eGenes in these eQTLs have previously been implicated in AD. This study identified cell-type specific expression patterns for established and potentially novel AD genes, found additional evidence for the role of myeloid cells in AD risk, and discovered potential novel blood and brain AD biomarkers that highlight the importance of cell-type specific analysis.


1994 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 871-879
Author(s):  
A Sharma ◽  
R Stein

The insulin gene is expressed exclusively in pancreatic islet beta cells. The principal regulator of insulin gene transcription in the islet is the concentration of circulating glucose. Previous studies have demonstrated that transcription is regulated by the binding of trans-acting factors to specific cis-acting sequences within the 5'-flanking region of the insulin gene. To identify the cis-acting control elements within the rat insulin II gene that are responsible for regulating glucose-stimulated expression in the beta cell, we analyzed the effect of glucose on the in vivo expression of a series of transfected 5'-flanking deletion mutant constructs. We demonstrate that glucose-induced transcription of the rat insulin II gene is mediated by sequences located between -126 and -91 bp relative to the transcription start site. This region contains two cis-acting elements that are essential for directing pancreatic beta-cell-type-specific expression of the rat insulin II gene, the insulin control element (ICE; -100 to -91 bp) and RIPE3b1 (-115 to -107 bp). The gel mobility shift assay was used to determine whether the formation of the ICE- and RIPE3b1-specific factor-DNA element complexes were affected in glucose-treated beta-cell extracts. We found that RIPE3b1 binding activity was selectively induced by about eightfold. In contrast, binding to other insulin cis-acting element sequences like the ICE and RIPE3a2 (-108 to -99 bp) were unaffected by these conditions. The RIPE3b1 binding complex was shown to be distinct from the glucose-inducible factor that binds to an element located between -227 to -206 bp of the human and rat insulin I genes (D. Melloul, Y. Ben-Neriah, and E. Cerasi, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 90:3865-3869, 1993). We have also shown that mannose, a sugar that can be metabolized by the beta cell, mimics the effects of glucose in the in vivo transfection assays and the in vitro RIPE3b1 binding assays. These results suggested that the RIPE3b1 transcription factor is a primary regulator of glucose-mediated transcription of the insulin gene. However, we found that mutations in either the ICE or the RIPE3b1 element reduced glucose-responsive expression from transfected 5'-flanking rat insulin II gene constructs. We therefore conclude that glucose-regulated transcription of the insulin gene is mediated by cis-acting elements required for beta-cell-type-specific expression.


2002 ◽  
Vol 324 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshiteru Urai ◽  
Osamu Jinnouchi ◽  
Kyung Tak Kwak ◽  
Atsuhiko Suzue ◽  
Shinji Nagahiro ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Jean-Baptiste ◽  
José L. McFaline-Figueroa ◽  
Cristina M. Alexandre ◽  
Michael W. Dorrity ◽  
Lauren Saunders ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTSingle-cell RNA-seq can yield high-resolution cell-type-specific expression signatures that reveal new cell types and the developmental trajectories of cell lineages. Here, we apply this approach toA. thalianaroot cells to capture gene expression in 3,121 root cells. We analyze these data with Monocle 3, which orders single cell transcriptomes in an unsupervised manner and uses machine learning to reconstruct single-cell developmental trajectories along pseudotime. We identify hundreds of genes with cell-type-specific expression, with pseudotime analysis of several cell lineages revealing both known and novel genes that are expressed along a developmental trajectory. We identify transcription factor motifs that are enriched in early and late cells, together with the corresponding candidate transcription factors that likely drive the observed expression patterns. We assess and interpret changes in total RNA expression along developmental trajectories and show that trajectory branch points mark developmental decisions. Finally, by applying heat stress to whole seedlings, we address the longstanding question of possible heterogeneity among cell types in the response to an abiotic stress. Although the response of canonical heat shock genes dominates expression across cell types, subtle but significant differences in other genes can be detected among cell types. Taken together, our results demonstrate that single-cell transcriptomics holds promise for studying plant development and plant physiology with unprecedented resolution.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abolfazl Doostparast Torshizi ◽  
Jubao Duan ◽  
Kai Wang

AbstractThe importance of cell type-specific gene expression in disease-relevant tissues is increasingly recognized in genetic studies of complex diseases. However, the vast majority of gene expression studies are conducted on bulk tissues, necessitating computational approaches to infer biological insights on cell type-specific contribution to diseases. Several computational methods are available for cell type deconvolution (that is, inference of cellular composition) from bulk RNA-Seq data, but cannot impute cell type-specific expression profiles. We hypothesize that with external prior information such as single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and population-wide expression profiles, it can be a computationally tractable and identifiable to estimate both cellular composition and cell type-specific expression from bulk RNA-Seq data. Here we introduce CellR, which addresses cross-individual gene expression variations by employing genome-wide tissue-wise expression signatures from GTEx to adjust the weights of cell-specific gene markers. It then transforms the deconvolution problem into a linear programming model while taking into account inter/intra cellular correlations, and uses a multi-variate stochastic search algorithm to estimate the expression level of each gene in each cell type. Extensive analyses on several complex diseases such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and type 2 diabetes validated efficiency of CellR, while revealing how specific cell types contribute to different diseases. We conducted numerical simulations on human cerebellum to generate pseudo-bulk RNA-seq data and demonstrated its efficiency in inferring cell-specific expression profiles. Moreover, we inferred cell-specific expression levels from bulk RNA-seq data on schizophrenia and computed differentially expressed genes within certain cell types. Using predicted gene expression profile on excitatory neurons, we were able to reproduce our recently published findings on TCF4 being a master regulator in schizophrenia and showed how this gene and its targets are enriched in excitatory neurons. In summary, CellR compares favorably (both accuracy and stability of inference) against competing approaches on inferring cellular composition from bulk RNA-seq data, but also allows direct imputation of cell type-specific gene expression, opening new doors to re-analyze gene expression data on bulk tissues in complex diseases.


1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 3253-3259 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Whelan ◽  
D Poon ◽  
P A Weil ◽  
R Stein

The insulin gene is expressed almost exclusively in pancreatic beta-cells. The DNA sequences that control cell-specific expression are located upstream of the transcription initiation site. To identify the cis-acting transcriptional control regions within the rat insulin II gene that are responsible for this tissue-specific expression pattern, we constructed a series of 5'-flanking deletion mutants and analyzed their expression in vivo in transfected insulin-producing and -nonproducing cell lines. Pancreatic beta-cell-specific expression was shown to be controlled by enhancer sequences lying between nucleotides -342 and -91 relative to the transcription start site. The rat insulin II enhancer appears to be a chimera, composed of a number of distinct cis-acting DNA elements. Both positive and negative transcriptional regulatory elements appear to be responsible for this cell-type-specific expression. We have shown that expression from one element within the enhancer, which is found between nucleotides -100 and -91, is regulated by both positive- and negative-acting cellular transcription factors. Expression from chimeras containing only the enhancer element sequences from -100 to -91 were active only in insulin-producing cells, indicating that the positive-acting factor(s) required for this activity may be active only in beta-cells. In contrast to the enhancer region, the rat insulin II gene promoter did not appear to require cell-specific transcription factors. Promoter mutants with 5'-flanking sequences extending to nucleotides -90 and -73 were constitutively active in both insulin-producing and -nonproducing cells. These results suggest that rat insulin II gene transcription in pancreatic beta-cells is imparted by a combination of both negative- and positive-acting cellular factors interacting with the gene enhancer.


Development ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 125 (9) ◽  
pp. 1711-1721 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.A. Hill ◽  
C.D. Day ◽  
S.C. Zondlo ◽  
A.G. Thackeray ◽  
V.F. Irish

The APETALA3 floral homeotic gene is required for petal and stamen development in Arabidopsis. APETALA3 transcripts are first detected in a meristematic region that will give rise to the petal and stamen primordia, and expression is maintained in this region during subsequent development of these organs. To dissect how the APETALA3 gene is expressed in this spatially and temporally restricted domain, various APETALA3 promoter fragments were fused to the uidA reporter gene encoding beta-glucuronidase and assayed for the resulting patterns of expression in transgenic Arabidopsis plants. Based on these promoter analyses, we defined cis-acting elements required for distinct phases of APETALA3 expression, as well as for petal-specific and stamen-specific expression. By crossing the petal-specific construct into different mutant backgrounds, we have shown that several floral genes, including APETALA3, PISTILLATA, UNUSUAL FLORAL ORGANS, and APETALA1, encode trans-acting factors required for second-whorl-specific APETALA3 expression. We have also shown that the products of the APETALA1, APETALA3, PISTILLATA and AGAMOUS genes bind to several conserved sequence motifs within the APETALA3 promoter. We present a model whereby spatially and temporally restricted APETALA3 transcription is controlled via interactions between proteins binding to different domains of the APETALA3 promoter.


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