Genome-wide analysis revealed a crosstalk between p53 and the pluripotent gene networks in mouse embryonic stem cells (expression)

The tumor suppressor p53 regulates the differentiation of embryonic stem (ES) cells upon DNA damage. However, our understanding of this critical tumor suppressive role of p53 in ES cells is limited, mainly because of the lack of molecular mechanism. Here, we report a widespread cross-regulation of p53-mediated DNA damage signaling and the pluripotent gene network in ES cells using chromatin-immunoprecipitation assay-based sequencing (ChIP-seq) and gene expression microarray. Upon DNA damage, p53 directly regulates the transcription of 3644 genes (p<0.005) in mouse ES cells. Genome-wide analysis revealed a dramatic difference between the regulation of p53-activated and -repressed genes. p53 mainly regulates the promoter regions of activated genes, whereas the main regulatory regions for repressed genes reside in distal regions. Among p53-repressed genes, many are pluripotent transcription factors of ES cells, such as Oct4, Nanog, Sox2, Esrrb, c-Myc, n-Myc and Sall4. Strikingly, these transcriptional factors also directly regulate the transcription of the Trp53 gene, highlighting a previously under-estimated transcriptional regulation of p53 in ES cells. Therefore, p53 signaling and ES pluripotent transcriptional networks form an intertwined circuitry. Together, our results provide mechanistic insights into the crosstalk of p53-mediated DNA damage and ES cell "stemness" transcriptional gene networks and shed light on the tumor suppressive function of p53 in ES cells.

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Li M, He Y, Dubois W, Wu X, Shi J, Huang J