This goal of this study was to identify genes that are deregulated in the absence of EZH2 in early lymphocyte progenitors.  Due to a requirement for EZH2 to repress Cdkn2a in early B and T cell development we generated Cdkn2a-/-Ezh2fl/fl Il7racre/+ mice.  We examined gene expression by RNA-sequencing in sorted pro-B cells (B220+CD19+CD43+), DN3 cells (Lin- CD25+ CD117-),  from Cdkn2a-/- Ezh2fl/fl Il7racre/+  and Cdkn2a-/- Il7racre/+ control mice.  Reads were aligned to the mm10 reference genome by Tophat2.1.0.   Reads were assigned to genes using the htseq-count tool from HTSeq v 0.6.1 and gene annotations from Ensembl release 78.   Differential expression was calculated across 3 independent replicates by EdgeR.  We found that pro-B and DN3 cells remain specified to their respective lineages despite loss of EZH2.  In contrast, loss of EZH2 led to expression of alternate lineage determinants in pro-B but not DN3 cells indicating that EZH2 is required for lineage commitment in B, but not T lymphocyte progenitors. SOURCE: Barbara,L,Kee The University of Chicago

Pluto Bioinformatics

GSE133993: RNA-seq of CDKN2A and EZH2-deficient pro-B and DN3 lymphocyte progenitors