Establishment of the haemopoietic transcriptional programme: From systems approaches to molecular mechanisms

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Our genes control how our body develops from one fertilized egg cell and all cells in our body contain the same set of genes. This cell rapidly divides and develops into a large variety of distinct cell types that make up the various organs in our body. All these cells express different genetic programs, meaning that not all of our genes are always active in every cell type. This cell-type-specific gene activation pattern is governed by another layer of control (on top of the layer of the genes) that tells cells which genes to switch on and off, thereby deciding which cell type develops. This additional control layer is called the 'epigenetic' layer and consists of two components: (1) a genome-wide network through which genes regulate each other to generate the appropriate gene expression patterns; (2) the DNA packing apparatus. Each cell contains one meter of DNA, and to be able to fit it into the nucleus, it is densely compacted by so called chromatin proteins such that inactive genes are highly compact and their DNA hidden, whereas active genes are in areas of reduced compaction. To activate an inactive, compact gene, protein complexes, so called 'transcription factors' push chromatin aside or modify it, so that genes become accessible to the factors that activate them. Studies in the past years focused on one gene at a time and led to the discovery of the transcription factors and chromatin components that control their activity. We learned to extract the tune that individual genes play but failed to hear the symphony. Our understanding of how all the genes in mammals are orchestrated to switch on and off in the right order is still superficial. Moreover, much of what we know is based on studies from cell lines, which represent fixed cell types or are cancer cells, and from simpler organisms, such as yeast. The situation in mammals is much more complex because building an organism from a fertilized egg involves turning one cell type into another (so called 'differentiation') in a precise hierarchical order which requires tight coordination of the activity of all the genes. In other words, building an organism is like building a house: we have to put the individual components together in a precise order and not start with the roof before the cellar. This proposal will use blood cell development in the mouse as a model to investigate the dynamics of cell differentiation in mammals. We will study all genes of a given cell type and use a sophisticated in vitro system based on embryonic stem cells where we can generate and purify different blood cell types. We then will identify which transcription factors and chromatin components regulate which genes at the different developmental stages and study at which level and when they are expressed. Until recently such global or 'systems biology' studies were beyond reach since the technology was lacking. However, with the latest technology we can determine the entire DNA sequence of one cell type in a very short time. This technology has been modified to study epigenetic changes at all genes and can now be used to identify what distinguishes genes of one cell type from those of another. However, one feature of such experiments is that they produce enormous amounts of data and require specialist knowledge to make sense of them. This is achieved by bioinformaticians developing new computer programs and mathematical modelers running simulations to predict the integrated, 'collective' behavior of genes. To this end we have formed an interdisciplinary consortium consisting of experimental researchers and computational biologists who will collaborate to understand how thousands of genes work together to generate specific cell types. The ultimate aim of these studies is to be able to understand how individual development is encoded in the DNA-sequence and to predict how changes in the DNA sequence impact on developmental processes.