Characterizing the contrasting roles of JMJD3 and UTX histone demethylases in T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia [GSKJ4_RNA-seq]

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is an immature hematopoietic malignancy driven mainly by oncogenic activation of NOTCH1 signaling. In this study we chemically inhibited the H3K27me3 demethylase JMJD3 using the GSKJ4 inhibitor and assayed for genome-wide changes in H3K27me3 and JMJD3 enrichment. This piece of data was further integrated to expression changes using RNA sequencing as well as ChIP-Sequencing analysis of H3K27me3 upon genomic knock-down of JMJD3 and UTX. These results, coupled to genomic analysis of primary samples for the genomic status of the UTX gene in T-ALL, helped us to identify a hitherto unknown role of JMJD3 as an oncogenice facilitator in leukemia whereas UTX seems to play a tumor suppressor role. Overall design: Whole RNA was extracted from 1-5 million primary cells from CUTLL1 human T cell leukemia cells untreated or treated with 2micromolar GSKJ4 using the RNAeasy kit (Qiagen) according to the manufacturer’s protocol. Poly-A+ (magnetic oligodT-containing beads (Invitrogen)) or Ribominus RNA was used for library preparation. cDNA preparation and strand-specific library construction was performed using the dUTP method. Libraries were sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq 2000 using 50bp single-read method. Differential gene expression analysis was performed between knockout vs wild-type background samples. Analysis was performed using DEGseq package leading to very similar conclusions.

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Ntziachristos P, Tsirigos A, Welstead GG, Trimarchi T, Bakogianni S, Xu L, Loizou E, Holmfeldt L, Strikoudis A, King B, Mullenders J, Becksfort J, Nedjic J, Paietta E, Tallman MS, Rowe JM, Tonon G, Satoh T, Kruidenier L, Prinjha R, Akira S, Van Vlierberghe P, Ferrando AA, Jaenisch R, Mullighan CG, Aifantis I