HOX13-dependent chromatin accessibility modulates the target repertoires of the HOX factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Hox genes encode essential transcription factors that control patterning during embryonic development. Distinct combinations of nested Hox expression domains establish cell and tissue identities 1–3 . Consequently, spatial or temporal de-regulation of Hox genes can cause severe alterations of the body plan 3 . While HOX factors have very similar DNA binding motifs, their binding specificity is, in part, mediated by co-factors 4–6 . Yet, the interplay between HOX binding specificities and the cellular context remains largely elusive. To gain insight into this question, we took advantage of developing limbs for which the differential expression of Hox genes is well-characterized 7 . We show that the transcription factors HOXA13 and HOXD13 (hereafter referred as HOX13) allow another HOX factor, HOXA11, to bind loci initially assumed to be HOX13-specific. Importantly, HOXA11 is unable to bind these loci in distal limbs lacking HOX13 function indicating that HOX13 modulates HOXA11 target repertoire. In addition, we find that the HOX13 factors implement the distal limb developmental program by triggering chromatin opening, a defining property of pioneer factors 8,9 . Finally, single cell analysis of chromatin accessibility reveals that HOX13 factors pioneer chromatin opening in a lineage specific manner. Together, our data uncover a new mechanism underlying HOX binding specificity, whereby tissue-specific variations in the target repertoire of HOX factors rely, at least in part, on HOX13-dependent chromatin accessibility.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".