Akademska digitalna zbirka SLovenije - logo
E-resources
Peer reviewed Open access
  • Genome-wide analysis of dif...
    Ecker, Simone; Chen, Lu; Pancaldi, Vera; Bagger, Frederik O; Fernández, José María; Carrillo de Santa Pau, Enrique; Juan, David; Mann, Alice L; Watt, Stephen; Casale, Francesco Paolo; Sidiropoulos, Nikos; Rapin, Nicolas; Merkel, Angelika; Stunnenberg, Hendrik G; Stegle, Oliver; Frontini, Mattia; Downes, Kate; Pastinen, Tomi; Kuijpers, Taco W; Rico, Daniel; Valencia, Alfonso; Beck, Stephan; Soranzo, Nicole; Paul, Dirk S

    Genome Biology, 01/2017, Volume: 18, Issue: 1
    Journal Article

    A healthy immune system requires immune cells that adapt rapidly to environmental challenges. This phenotypic plasticity can be mediated by transcriptional and epigenetic variability. We 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. Our 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 .