Genome-wide analysis of differential transcriptional and epigenetic variability across human immune cell types
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- Ecker_2017_Genome-wide_analysis
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Background: A healthy immune system requires immune cells that adapt rapidly to environmental challenges. This phenotypic plasticity can be mediated by transcriptional and epigenetic variability. Results: We apply a novel analytical approach to measure and compare transcriptional and epigenetic variability genome-wide across CD14+CD16-monocytes, CD66b+CD16+neutrophils, and CD4+CD45RA+naïve T cells from the same 125 healthy individuals. We discover substantially increased variability in neutrophils compared to monocytes and T cells. In neutrophils, genes with hypervariable expression are found to be implicated in key immune pathways and are associated with cellular properties and environmental exposure. We also observe increased sex-specific gene expression differences in neutrophils. Neutrophil-specific DNA methylation hypervariable sites are enriched at dynamic chromatin regions and active enhancers. Conclusions: Our data highlight the importance of transcriptional and epigenetic variability for the key role of neutrophils as the first responders to inflammatory stimuli. We provide a resource to enable further functional studies into the plasticity of immune cells, which can be accessed from: http://blueprint-dev.bioinfo.cnio.es/WP10/hypervariability.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 18 |
Journal | Genome Biology |
Volume | 18 |
Issue number | 1 |
Number of pages | 17 |
ISSN | 1474-7596 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 26 Jan 2017 |
- Differential variability, DNA methylation, Gene expression, Heterogeneity, Immune cells, Monocytes, Neutrophils, Phenotypic plasticity, T cells
Research areas
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