Zhu Bing's research group and Xu Ruiming's research group cooperated to reveal that the CpG island-binding protein BEND3 regulates two processes in the differentiation process...

On February 10, 2022, Zhu Bing's research group from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with Xu Ruiming's research group, published a research paper titled "Highly enriched BEND3 prevents the premature activation of bivalent genes during differentiation" online in the journal Science .

CpG islands are important regulatory sequences in vertebrate genomes, rich in unmethylated CpG dinucleotides, and are often found in the promoters of active housekeeping genes and developmentally related bivalent genes.

In this study, the researchers found that BEND3 can specifically bind to the promoter regions of active genes and bivalent genes containing CpG islands in the genome, and found the DNA motifs that BEND3 specifically binds to

In embryonic stem cells, the bivalent promoter, that is, the presence of both activating H3K4me3 and repressive H3K27me3 histone marks, is generally considered to maintain development-related genes in a "ready-to-go" state in preparation for Activates rapidly upon differentiation

Figure: BEND3 plays an important role in mouse embryonic development and embryonic stem cell differentiation

Researcher Zhu Bing and researcher Xu Ruiming from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences are the co-corresponding authors of this paper

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(Contributed by Zhu Bing Research Group)