SRA

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are capable of regenerating the blood system, but the instructive cues that direct HSCs to regenerate particular lineages lost to the injury remain elusive. Here, we show that iron is increasingly taken up by HSCs during anemia and induces erythroid gene expression and regeneration in a Tet2-dependent manner. Lineage tracing of HSCs revealed that HSCs respond to hemolytic anemia by increasing erythroid output. The number of HSCs in the spleen, but not bone marrow, increased upon anemia and these HSCs exhibited enhanced proliferation, erythroid differentiation, iron uptake, and TET2 protein expression. Increased iron in HSCs promoted DNA demethylation and expression of erythroid genes. Suppressing iron uptake or TET2 expression impaired erythroid genes expression and erythroid differentiation of HSCs; iron supplementation, however, augmented these processes. These results establish that the physiological level of iron taken up by HSCs has an instructive role in promoting erythroid-biased differentiation of HSCs. Overall design: Bisulfite-seq in control bone marrow HSCs and PHZ-treated bone marrow and splenic HSCs. The WT and PHZ-treated bone marrow HSC samples have 3 replicates each, the WT splenic HSC samples have 2 replicates, and the PHZ-treated splenic HSC samples have 3 replicates.