Bump Paul, Loubet-Senear Kaitlyn, Arnold Sarah, Srivastava Mansi
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Development. 2025 May 15;152(10). doi: 10.1242/dev.204799. Epub 2025 May 23.
Chromatin profiling data can generate and corroborate hypotheses for regulatory events that underlie the control of gene expression in biological processes. Here, we have profiled chromatin accessibility to build a catalog of putative regulatory DNA during embryonic development in an acoel. Acoels represent an enigmatic phylum-level lineage of animals, the Xenacoelomorpha, which is placed either as a sister group to all other animals with bilateral symmetry or as an early diverging ambulacrarian, positioned equally well to inform the evolution of developmental mechanisms. We focused on the acoel Hofstenia miamia, a new research organism for studying whole-body regeneration that also enables investigations of development from zygote to hatching. We profiled chromatin landscapes encompassing major morphological events during development, and combined transcription factor-binding analyses with single-cell RNA-sequencing data to provide regulatory linkages in a hypothesized differentiation trajectory for epidermis, as well as a new gene regulatory network associated with the formation of muscle. This work enables comparisons of chromatin state during embryogenesis between acoels and other animals, as well as comparisons of embryogenesis to regeneration.
染色质分析数据可以生成并证实有关生物学过程中基因表达调控基础的调控事件的假设。在此，我们对染色质可及性进行了分析，以构建一个关于无肠目动物胚胎发育期间推定的调控DNA的目录。无肠目动物代表了动物界一个神秘的门级谱系，即异涡虫动物门，它要么被置于所有其他两侧对称动物的姐妹群位置，要么被置于早期分化的步带动物位置，同样有助于了解发育机制的进化。我们聚焦于无肠目动物米氏霍氏涡虫，这是一种用于研究全身再生的新型研究生物，它还能让我们研究从受精卵到孵化的发育过程。我们对发育过程中包含主要形态学事件的染色质景观进行了分析，并将转录因子结合分析与单细胞RNA测序数据相结合，以在假定的表皮分化轨迹以及与肌肉形成相关的新基因调控网络中提供调控联系。这项工作能够比较无肠目动物与其他动物胚胎发育过程中的染色质状态，以及胚胎发育与再生过程。
