Research Papers:
Comprehensive mapping of the effects of azacitidine on DNA methylation, repressive/permissive histone marks and gene expression in primary cells from patients with MDS and MDS-related disease
PDF | HTML | Supplementary Files | How to cite
Metrics: PDF 2463 views | HTML 4201 views | ?
Abstract
Magnus Tobiasson1,*, Hani Abdulkadir1,*, Andreas Lennartsson2, Shintaro Katayama2, Francesco Marabita3,4, Ayla De Paepe1, Mohsen Karimi1, Kaarel Krjutskov2,5,6, Elisabet Einarsdottir2,5, Michael Grövdal1, Monika Jansson1, Asmaa Ben Azenkoud1, Lina Corddedu2, Sören Lehmann1,7, Karl Ekwall2, Juha Kere2,5, Eva Hellström-Lindberg1,* and Johanna Ungerstedt1,*
1Center for Hematology and Regenerative Medicine, Department of Medicine Huddinge, Division of Hematology Karolinska Institutet, Karolinska University Hospital Huddinge, Huddinge, Sweden
2Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
3Unit of Computational Medicine, Center for Molecular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
4National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden
5Molecular Neurology Research Program, University of Helsinki, and Folkhälsan Institute of Genetics, Helsinki, Finland
6Competence Centre on Health Technologies, Tartu, Estonia
7Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
*These authors have contributed equally to this work
Correspondence to:
Magnus Tobiasson, email: [email protected]
Keywords: MDS, azacitidine, epigenetics, DNA methylation, histone modifications
Received: November 09, 2016 Accepted: February 01, 2017 Published: February 28, 2017
ABSTRACT
Azacitidine (Aza) is first-line treatment for patients with high-risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), although its precise mechanism of action is unknown. We performed the first study to globally evaluate the epigenetic effects of Aza on MDS bone marrow progenitor cells assessing gene expression (RNA seq), DNA methylation (Illumina 450k) and the histone modifications H3K18ac and H3K9me3 (ChIP seq). Aza induced a general increase in gene expression with 924 significantly upregulated genes but this increase showed no correlation with changes in DNA methylation or H3K18ac, and only a weak association with changes in H3K9me3. Interestingly, we observed activation of transcripts containing 15 endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) confirming previous cell line studies. DNA methylation decreased moderately in 99% of all genes, with a median β-value reduction of 0.018; the most pronounced effects seen in heterochromatin. Aza-induced hypomethylation correlated significantly with change in H3K9me3. The pattern of H3K18ac and H3K9me3 displayed large differences between patients and healthy controls without any consistent pattern induced by Aza. We conclude that the marked induction of gene expression only partly could be explained by epigenetic changes, and propose that activation of ERVs may contribute to the clinical effects of Aza in MDS.
![Creative Commons License](/images/80x15.png)
PII: 15807