Chd4 remodels chromatin to control retinal cell type specification and lineage termination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract During development, neural progenitor cells modify their output over time to produce different types of neurons and glia in chronological sequences. Previous studies have shown that epigenetic processes play a crucial role in regulating neural progenitor potential, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we hypothesized that nucleosome remodelling would regulate the competence transitions of retinal progenitors. We generated retina-specific conditional knockouts (cKOs) in the key nucleosome remodelling enzyme Chd4 . Chd4 cKOs overproduced early-born retinal ganglion and amacrine cells. Postnatally, later-born rod photoreceptors were drastically underproduced. Concomitantly, progenitors failed to be exhausted at late phases of development and ultimately overproduced Müller glia. To determine how Chd4 regulates the genome, we used cut&run-seq to reveal Chd4 genome occupancy, and ATAC-seq experiments to visualize nucleosome remodelling. These data revealed that genome accessibility was significantly increased at ∼10,000 regulatory elements and ∼4,000 genes in the Chd4 cKO. Together, these results suggest that Chd4 restricts the genome to repress progenitor identity and promote rod photoreceptor production. Accordingly, multiplexed single-cell transcriptomics demonstrated that deletion of Chd4 led to markedly divergent gene expression profiles. However, despite overproduction of early fates and underproduction of later-born rods, the perinatal transition between early and late progenitor competence was not altered as determined by birthdating experiments and transcriptomic signatures. Taken together, our data suggest that Chd4-dependent chromatin remodelling regulates cell fate specification, and is also required to terminate retinal neurogenesis, but that it does not regulate the progenitor competence windows that restrict early- vs. late-cell-type production. Key findings 1) Chd4 cKOs exhibit a strong shift in neurogenesis, with early-born neurons overproduced and late-born neurons underproduced. 2) We present an epigenetic atlas that combines the occupancy of NuRD proteins such as Chd4 and Mbd3, with nucleosome remodelling data and transcriptomic correlates. 3) We show that NuRD regulates the competence transition that terminates the retinal lineage but not earlier competence transitions, showing for the first time that the epigenetic mechanisms governing retinal competence transitions may vary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".