Dynamic control of enhancer activity drives stage-specific gene expression during flower morphogenesis.

Yan W, Chen D#,*, Schumacher J, Durantini D, Engelhorn J, Chen M, Carles CC, Kaufmann K
Nat Commun. 2019 Apr 12;10(1):1705. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-09513-2.
Abstract

Enhancers are critical for developmental stage-specific gene expression, but their dynamic regulation in plants remains poorly understood. Here we compare genome-wide localization of H3K27ac, chromatin accessibility and transcriptomic changes during flower development in Arabidopsis. H3K27ac prevalently marks promoter-proximal regions, suggesting that H3K27ac is not a hallmark for enhancers in Arabidopsis. We provide computational and experimental evidence to confirm that distal DNase 袉 hypersensitive sites are predictive of enhancers. The predicted enhancers are highly stage-specific across flower development, significantly associated with SNPs for flowering-related phenotypes, and conserved across crucifer species. Through the integration of genome-wide transcription factor (TF) binding datasets, we find that floral master regulators and stage-specific TFs are largely enriched at developmentally dynamic enhancers. Finally, we show that enhancer clusters and intronic enhancers significantly associate with stage-specific gene regulation by floral master TFs. Our study provides insights into the functional flexibility of enhancers during plant development, as well as hints to annotate plant enhancers.

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School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University
Nanjing 210023, China

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