Single-cell profiling reveals that eRNA accumulation at enhancer–promoter loops is not required to sustain transcription
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Enhancers are intergenic DNA elements that regulate the transcription of target genes in response to signaling pathways by interacting with promoters over large genomic distances. Recent studies have revealed that enhancers are bi-directionally transcribed into enhancer RNAs (eRNAs). Using single-molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH), we investigated the eRNA-mediated regulation of transcription during estrogen induction in MCF-7 cells. We demonstrate that eRNAs are localized exclusively in the nucleus and are induced with similar kinetics as target mRNAs. However, eRNAs are mostly nascent at enhancers and their steady-state levels remain lower than those of their cognate mRNAs. Surprisingly, at the single-allele level, eRNAs are rarely co-expressed with their target loci, demonstrating that active gene transcription does not require the continuous transcription of eRNAs or their accumulation at enhancers. When co-expressed, sub-diffraction distance measurements between nascent mRNA and eRNA signals reveal that co-transcription of eRNAs and mRNAs rarely occurs within closed enhancer-promoter loops. Lastly, basal eRNA transcription at enhancers, but not E2-induced transcription, is maintained upon depletion of MLL1 and ERα, suggesting some degree of chromatin accessibility prior to signal-dependent activation of transcription. Together, our findings suggest that eRNA accumulation at enhancer-promoter loops is not required to sustain target gene transcription.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".