Comparative Analyses of H3K4 and H3K27 Trimethylations Between the Mouse Cerebrum and Testis

The global features of H3K4 and H3K27 trimethylations （H3K4me3 and H3K27me3） have been well studied in recent years, but most of these studies were performed in mammalian cell lines. In this work, we generated the genorne-wide maps of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 of mouse cerebrum and testis using ChlP-seq and their high-coverage transcriptomes using ribominus RNA-seq with SOLID technology. We examined the global patterns of H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 in both tissues and found that modifications are closely-associated with tissue-specific expression, function and development. Moreover, we revealed that H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 rarely occur in silent genes, which contradicts the findings in previous studies. Finally, we observed that bivalent domains, with both H3K4me3 and H3K27me3, existed ubiquitously in both tissues and demonstrated an invariable preference for the regulation of developmentally-related genes. How- ever, the bivalent domains tend towards a ＂winner-takes-all＂ approach to regulate the expression of associated genes. We also verified the above results in mouse ES cells. As expected, the results in ES cells are consistent with those in cerebrum and testis. In conclusion, we present two very important findings. One is that H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 rarely occur in silent genes. The other is that bivalent domains may adopt a ＂winner-takes-all＂ principle to regulate gene expression.

The Association Between H3K4me3 and Antisense Transcription

Histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation （H3K4me3） is well known to occur in the promoter region of genes for transcription activation. How- ever, when investigating the H3K4me3 profiles in the mouse cerebrum and testis, we discovered that H3K4me3 also has a significant enrichment at the 3＇ end of actively transcribed （sense） genes, named as 3＇-H3K4me3. 3＇-H3K4me3 is associated with ~15% of pro- tein-coding genes in both tissues. In addition, we examined the transcriptional initiation signals including RNA polymerase II （RNAPII） binding sites and Y-CAGE-tag that marks transcriptional start sites. Interestingly, we found that 3＇-H3K4me3 is associated with the ini- tiation of antisense transcription. Furthermore, 3＇-H3K4me3 modification levels correlate positively with the antisense expression levels of the associated sense genes, implying that 3＇-H3K4me3 is involved in the activation of antisense transcription. Taken together, our findings suggest that H3K4me3 may be involved in the regulation of antisense transcription that initiates from the 3＇ end of sense genes. In addition, a positive correlation was also observed between the expression of antisense and the associated sense genes with 3＇-H3K4me3 modification. More importantly, we observed the 3＇-H3K4me3 enrichment among genes in human, fruitfly and Arabidopsis, and found that the sequences of 3＇-H3K4me3-marked regions are highly conserved and essentially indistinguishable from known promoters in ver- tebrate. Therefore, we speculate that these 3＇-H3K4me3-marked regions may serve as potential promoters for antisense transcription and 3＇-H3K4me3 appear to be a universal epigenetic feature in eukaryotes. Our results provide a novel insight into the epigenetic roles of H3K4me3 and the regulatory mechanism of antisense transcription.