ZIC3 Controls the Transition from Naive to Primed Pluripotency

Abstract

Summary: Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) must transition through a series of intermediate cell states before becoming terminally differentiated. Here, we investigated the early events in this transition by determining the changes in the open chromatin landscape as naive mouse ESCs transition to epiblast-like cells (EpiLCs). Motif enrichment analysis of the newly opening regions coupled with expression analysis identified ZIC3 as a potential regulator of this cell fate transition. Chromatin binding and genome-wide transcriptional profiling following Zic3 depletion confirmed ZIC3 as an important regulatory transcription factor, and among its targets are genes encoding a number of transcription factors. Among these is GRHL2, which acts through enhancer switching to maintain the expression of a subset of genes from the ESC state. Our data therefore place ZIC3 upstream of a set of pro-differentiation transcriptional regulators and provide an important advance in our understanding of the regulatory factors governing the early steps in ESC differentiation. : We know relatively little about how the early steps of differentiation from naive embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are controlled. Here, Yang et al. profile the chromatin accessibility changes during the transition of ESCs to epiblast-like cells and identify the transcription factor ZIC3 as an important regulator of this transition. Keywords: ZIC3, enhancer, embryonic stem cells