SRA

Serum-to-2i interconversion of mouse Embryonic Stem Cells (mESCs) is a valuable in vitro model for early embryonic development. To assess whether 3D chromatin organization changes during this transition, we established Capture Hi-C with target-sequence enrichment of DNase I hypersensitive sites. We detected extremely long-range intra- and inter-chromosomal interactions between a small subset of H3K27me3 marked bivalent promoters involving the Hox clusters in serum grown cells. Notably, these promoter-mediated interactions are not present in 2i ground-state pluripotent mESCs but appear upon further development into primed-like serum mESCs. Reverting serum mESCs to ground-state 2i mESCs removes these promoter-promoter interactions in a spatiotemporal manner. H3K27me3, which is largely absent at bivalent promoters in ground-state 2i mESCs, is necessary but not sufficient to establish these interactions, as confirmed by Capture Hi-C on Eed-/- serum mESCs. Our results implicate H3K27me3 and PRC2 as critical players in chromatin alteration during priming of ESCs for differentiation. Overall design: To study dynamics in chromatin architecture and to characterize long-range interaction, we performed Hi-C using DpnII as the restriction enzyme, potentially reaching a genome-wide coverage at a less than 1Kb resolution. We subsequently performed enrichment of interaction by a target capture similar to the exome sequencing approach. We enriched for DNaseI hyper-sensitive sites (DHS’s) in chromatin from mESCs. Probes were designed against the union of all DHS’s of Serum and 2i mESCs. Capture Hi-C reveals Extremely Long-Range Interactions (ELRI) in Serum but not in 2i ESCs. We observed H3K27me3 as a prominent characteristic, but not exclusive feature of ELRI loci in Serum mESCs. To further elucidate the involvement of constituents of PRC1 and PRC2 in ELRI, we performed ChIP-seq experiment on Suz12 and Ring1B during serum-to-2i transition. In addition, RNA-seq was performed to compare the expression levels of genes.