Guangzhou Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences discovers a new switch that regulates the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells

Beijing time on March 4, 2021, Zhong Keyuan Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health research team in "Nature" (Nature) magazine entitled "RNA m ⁶ A Reader YTHDC1 silences retrotransposons and the Cell Guards ES the Identity," published papers, Discovered a new switch that regulates the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells: RNA m ⁶ A reader protein YTHDC1 can regulate the formation of heterochromatin and affect the pluripotency of mouse embryonic stem cells.

m ⁶ A is the most abundant modification on RNA, and it has attracted much attention because it regulates the processes of splicing, transport, degradation, and translation of RNA.

This work first constructed a mouse embryonic stem cell line with Ythdc1 conditionally knocked out, and found that the transcriptome of Ythdc1-cKO cells was obviously activated by the expression of TEs silenced by H3K9me3 (including IAP and LINE1), and H3K9me3 on these TEs The signal is greatly reduced, indicating that YTHDC1 and H3K9me3 are in a regulatory relationship.

The research team also found that the above-mentioned mechanism plays a key role in maintaining the stemness of embryonic stem cells.

Different from the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells, 2C-like cells have developmental totipotency.

The discovery of this work provides important enlightenment for understanding how RNA regulates chromatin in mammals, and also promotes a further understanding of the biological functions of RNA m ⁶ A modification, as well as the maintenance and transformation of the pluripotency and pluripotency of stem cells.

China Ke Xueyuan Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health researcher Jay Chen Kai-oriented co-first author of the paper corresponding author, PhD student Liu Jiadong, Gau Island Biological Laboratory and Wei He Jiangping Research Associate oriented papers.

Related paper information: org/10.