Biology subjects

Deplancke, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Deplancke, B..

46 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

bioRxiv2019

Primate-restricted KRAB zinc finger proteins and target retrotransposons control gene expression in human neurons

In the first days of embryogenesis, transposable element-embedded regulatory sequences (TEeRS) are silenced by Kruppel-associated box (KRAB)-zinc finger proteins (KZFPs). Many TEeRS are subsequently coopted in transcription networks, but how KZFPs influence this process is largely unknown. We identify ZNF417 and ZNF587 as primate-specific KZFPs repressing HERVK (human endogenous retrovirus K) and SVA (SINE-VNTR-Alu) integrants in human embryonic stem cells (ESC). Expressed in specific regions of the human developing and adult brain, ZNF417/587 keep controlling TEeRS in ESC-derived neurons and brain organoids, secondarily influencing the differentiation and neurotransmission profile of neurons and preventing the induction of neurotoxic retroviral proteins and an interferon-like response. Thus, evolutionarily recent KZFPs and their TE targets partner up to influence human neuronal differentiation and physiology. One Sentence SummaryYoung transposable elements and their protein controllers team up to regulate the differentiation and function of human neurons.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2019

A highly parallel, automated platform enabling individual or sequential ChIP of histone marks and transcription factors

Despite its popularity, chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) remains a tedious (>2d), manually intensive, low-sensitivity and low-throughput approach. Here, we combine principles of microengineering, surface chemistry and molecular biology to address the major limitations of standard ChIP-seq. The resulting approach, FloChIP, automates and miniaturizes ChIP in a beadless fashion while facilitating the downstream library preparation process through on-chip chromatin tagmentation. FloChIP is fast (<2h), has a wide dynamic range (from 106 to 500 cells), is high-throughput (up to 64 parallel, antibody- or sample-multiplexed experiments) and is compatible with both histone mark and transcription factor ChIP. In addition, FloChIPs interconnected design allows for straightforward chromatin re-immunoprecipitation, thus constituting the first example of a microfluidic sequential ChIP-seq system. Finally, we demonstrate FloChIPs high-throughput capacity by performing ChIP-seq of the transcription factor MEF2A in 32 distinct human lymphoblastoid cell lines, providing novel insights into the main factors driving collaborative DNA binding of MEF2A and into its role in B-cell-specific gene regulation. Together, our results validate FloChIP as a flexible and reproducible automated solution for individual or sequential ChIP-seq.

bioengineering↗

bioRxiv2019

An hourglass pattern of inter-embryo gene expression variability and of histone regulation in fly embryogenesis

The evolution of embryological development has long been characterized by deep conservation. Both morphological and transcriptomic surveys have proposed a \"hourglass\" model of Evo-Devo1,2. A stage in mid-embryonic development, the phylotypic stage, is highly conserved among species within the same phylum3-7. However, the reason for this phylotypic stage is still elusive. Here we hypothesize that the phylotypic stage might be characterized by selection for robustness to noise and environmental perturbations. This could lead to mutational robustness, thus evolutionary conservation of expression and the hourglass pattern. To test this, we quantified expression variability of single embryo transcriptomes throughout fly Drosophila melanogaster embryogenesis. We found that indeed expression variability is lower at extended germband, the phylotypic stage. We explain this pattern by stronger histone modification mediated transcriptional noise control at this stage. In addition, we find evidence that histone modifications can also contribute to mutational robustness in regulatory elements. Thus, the robustness to noise does indeed contributes to robustness of gene expression to genetic variations, and to the conserved phylotypic stage.

developmental biology↗

bioRxiv2019

Dynamic regulation of chromatin accessibility by pluripotency transcription factors across the cell cycle

The pioneer activity of transcription factors allows for opening of inaccessible regulatory elements and has been extensively studied in the context of cellular differentiation and reprogramming. In contrast, the function of pioneer activity in self-renewing cell divisions and across the cell cycle is poorly understood. Here we assessed the interplay between OCT4 and SOX2 in controlling chromatin accessibility of mouse embryonic stem cells. We found that OCT4 and SOX2 operate in a largely independent manner even at co-occupied sites, and that their cooperative binding is mostly mediated indirectly through regulation of chromatin accessibility. Controlled protein degradation strategies revealed that the uninterrupted presence of OCT4 is required for post-mitotic re-establishment and interphase maintenance of chromatin accessibility, and that highly OCT4-bound enhancers are particularly vulnerable to transient loss of OCT4 expression. Our study sheds light on the constant pioneer activity required to maintain the dynamic pluripotency regulatory landscape in an accessible state.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2018

Extensive mitochondrial population structure and haplotype-specific phenotypic variation in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel

The Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP) serves as a valuable resource to better understand the genetic landscapes underlying quantitative traits. However, such DGRP studies have so far only focused on nuclear genetic variants. To address this, we sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of >170 DGRP lines, identifying 229 variants including 21 indels and 7 frameshifts. We used our mitochondrial variation data to identify 12 genetically distinct mitochondrial haplotypes, thus revealing important population structure at the mitochondrial level. We further examined whether this population structure was reflected on the nuclear genome by screening for the presence of potential mito-nuclear genetic incompatibilities in the form of significant genotype ratio distortions (GRDs) between mitochondrial and nuclear variants. In total, we detected a remarkable 1,845 mito-nuclear GRDs, with the highest enrichment observed in a 40 kb region around the gene Sex-lethal (Sxl). Intriguingly, downstream phenotypic analyses did not uncover major fitness effects associated with these GRDs, suggesting that a large number of mito-nuclear GRDs may reflect population structure at the mitochondrial level rather than actual genomic incompatibilities. This is further supported by the GRD landscape showing particular large genomic regions associated with a single mitochondrial haplotype. Next, we explored the functional relevance of the detected mitochondrial haplotypes through an association analysis on a set of 259 assembled, non-correlating DGRP phenotypes. We found multiple significant associations with stress- and metabolism-related phenotypes, including food intake in males. We validated the latter observation by reciprocal swapping of mitochondrial genomes from high food intake DGRP lines to low food intake ones. In conclusion, our study uncovered important mitochondrial population structure and haplotype-specific metabolic variation in the DGRP, thus demonstrating the significance of incorporating mitochondrial haplotypes in geno-phenotype relationship studies.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2018

Commensal bacteria act as a broad genetic buffer in Drosophila during chronic under-nutrition

Eukaryotic genomes encode several well-studied buffering mechanisms that robustly maintain invariant phenotypic outcome despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Here we show that the gut microbiota, represented by a single Drosophila facultative symbiont, Lactobacillus plantarum (LpWJL), acts also as a broad genetic buffer that masks the contribution of the cryptic genetic variations in the host under nutritional stress. During chronic under-nutrition, LpWJL consistently reduces variation in different host phenotypic traits and ensures robust organ patterning; LpWJL also decreases genotype-dependent expression variation, particularly for development-associated genes. We further demonstrate that LpWJL buffers via reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling whose inhibition severely impairs microbiota-mediated phenotypic robustness. We thus identified an unexpected contribution of facultative symbionts to Drosophila fitness by assuring developmental robustness and phenotypic homogeneity in times of nutritional stress.

developmental biology↗

bioRxiv2018

Genomic analysis of European Drosophila melanogaster populations on a dense spatial scale reveals longitudinal population structure and continent-wide selection

Genetic variation is the fuel of evolution, with standing genetic variation especially important for short-term evolution and local adaptation. To date, studies of spatio-temporal patterns of genetic variation in natural populations have been challenging, as comprehensive sampling is logistically difficult, and sequencing of entire populations costly. Here, we address these issues using a collaborative approach, sequencing 48 pooled population samples from 32 locations, and perform the first continent-wide genomic analysis of genetic variation in European Drosophila melanogaster. Our analyses uncover longitudinal population structure, provide evidence for continent-wide selective sweeps, identify candidate genes for local climate adaptation, and document clines in chromosomal inversion and transposable element frequencies. We also characterise variation among populations in the composition of the fly microbiome, and identify five new DNA viruses in our samples.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2018

Time- and cost-efficient high-throughput transcriptomics enabled by Bulk RNA Barcoding and sequencing

Genome-wide gene expression analyses by RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) have quickly become a standard in molecular biology because of the widespread availability of high throughput sequencing technologies. While powerful, RNA-seq still has several limitations, including the time and cost of library preparation, which makes it difficult to profile many samples simultaneously. To deal with these constraints, the single-cell transcriptomics field has implemented the early multiplexing principle, making the library preparation of hundreds of samples (cells) markedly more affordable. However, the current standard methods for bulk transcriptomics (such as TruSeq Stranded mRNA) remain expensive, and relatively little effort has been invested to develop cheaper, but equally robust methods. Here, we present a novel approach, Bulk RNA Barcoding and sequencing (BRB-seq), that combines the multiplexing-driven cost-effectiveness of a single-cell RNA-seq workflow with the performance of a bulk RNA-seq procedure. BRB-seq produces 3 enriched cDNA libraries that exhibit similar gene expression quantification to TruSeq and that maintain this quality, also in terms of number of detected differentially expressed genes, even with low quality RNA samples. We show that BRB-seq is about 25 times less expensive than TruSeq, enabling the generation of ready to sequence libraries for up to 192 samples in a day with only 2 hours of hands-on time. We conclude that BRB-seq constitutes a powerful alternative to TruSeq as a standard bulk RNA-seq approach. Moreover, we anticipate that this novel method will eventually replace RT-qPCR-based gene expression screens given its capacity to generate genome-wide transcriptomic data at a cost that is comparable to profiling 4 genes using RT-qPCR.\n\n SoftwareWe developed a suite of open source tools (BRB-seqTools) to aid with processing BRB-seq data and generating count matrices that are used for further analyses. This suite can perform demultiplexing, generate count/UMI matrices and trim BRB-seq constructs and is freely available at http://github.com/DeplanckeLab/BRB-seqTools\n\nHighlightsO_LIRapid (~2h hands on time) and low-cost approach to perform transcriptomics on hundreds of RNA samples\nC_LIO_LIStrand specificity preserved\nC_LIO_LIPerformance: number of detected genes is equal to Illumina TruSeq Stranded mRNA at same sequencing depth\nC_LIO_LIHigh capacity: low cost allows increasing the number of biological replicates\nC_LIO_LIProduces reliable data even with low quality RNA samples (down to RIN value = 2)\nC_LIO_LIComplete user-friendly sequencing data pre-processing and analysis pipeline allowing result acquisition in a day\nC_LI

genomics↗

bioRxiv2017

The Human Cell Atlas

The recent advent of methods for high-throughput single-cell molecular profiling has catalyzed a growing sense in the scientific community that the time is ripe to complete the 150-year-old effort to identify all cell types in the human body, by undertaking a Human Cell Atlas Project as an international collaborative effort. The aim would be to define all human cell types in terms of distinctive molecular profiles (e.g., gene expression) and connect this information with classical cellular descriptions (e.g., location and morphology). A comprehensive reference map of the molecular state of cells in healthy human tissues would propel the systematic study of physiological states, developmental trajectories, regulatory circuitry and interactions of cells, as well as provide a framework for understanding cellular dysregulation in human disease. Here we describe the idea, its potential utility, early proofs-of-concept, and some design considerations for the Human Cell Atlas.

cell biology↗

bioRxiv2016

ASAP: a Web-based platform for the analysis and inter-active visualization of single-cell RNA-seq data

MotivationSingle-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) allows whole transcriptome profiling of thousands of individual cells, enabling the molecular exploration of tissues at the cellular level. Such analytical capacity is of great interest to many research groups in the world, yet, these groups often lack the expertise to handle complex scRNA-seq data sets.\n\nResultsWe developed a fully integrated, web-based platform aimed at the complete analysis of scRNA-seq data post genome alignment: from the parsing, filtering, and normalization of the input count data files, to the visual representation of the data, identification of cell clusters, differentially expressed genes (including cluster-specific marker genes), and functional gene set enrichment. This Automated Single-cell Analysis Pipeline (ASAP) combines a wide range of commonly used algorithms with sophisticated visualization tools. Compared with existing scRNA-seq analysis platforms, researchers (including those lacking computational expertise) are able to interact with the data in a straightforward fashion and in real time. Furthermore, given the overlap between scRNA-seq and bulk RNA-seq analysis workflows, ASAP should conceptually be broadly applicable to any RNA-seq dataset. As a validation, we demonstrate how we can use ASAP to simply reproduce the results from a single-cell study of 91 mouse cells involving five distinct cell types.\n\nAvailabilityThe tool is freely available at http://asap.epfl.ch\n\nContactbart.deplancke@epfl.ch

bioinformatics↗