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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Daniel Rico RodriguezORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
BackgroundA healthy immune system requires immune cells that adapt rapidly to environmental challenges. This phenotypic plasticity can be mediated by transcriptional and epigenetic variability.ResultsWe 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.ConclusionsOur 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.
Author(s): Ecker S, Chen L, Pancaldi V, Bagger FO, Fernandez JM, Carrillo-de-Santa-Pau E, Juan D, Mann AL, Watt S, Casale FP, Sidiropoulos N, Rapin N, Merkel A, BLUEPRINT Consortium, Stunnenberg HG, Stegle O, Frontini M, Downes K, Pastinen T, Kuijpers TW, Rico D, Valencia A, Beck B, Soranzo N, Paul DS
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Genome Biology
Year: 2017
Volume: 18
Online publication date: 26/01/2017
Acceptance date: 17/01/2017
Date deposited: 27/02/2017
ISSN (print): 1474-7596
ISSN (electronic): 1474-760X
Publisher: BioMed Central Ltd.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13059-017-1156-8
DOI: 10.1186/s13059-017-1156-8
PubMed id: 28126036
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