TY  - GEN
T1  - The C. elegans pseudogene sspt-16 (F55A3.7) is required to safeguard germ cells against reprogramming
AU  - Ofenbauer, Andreas
AU  - Kraus, Clara Maria
AU  - Tursun, Baris
DO  - 10.17912/micropub.biology.000392
UR  - http://beta.micropublication.org/journals/biology/micropub-biology-000392/
AB  - FAcilitates Chromatin Transcription (FACT) is a histone chaperone complex, which is implicated in a variety of biological processes by regulating nucleosome deposition and chromatin accessibility (Orphanides et al. 1998; Hammond et al. 2017). In C. elegans, we previously demonstrated that FACT is a reprogramming barrier of transcription factor (TF) mediated reprogramming to neuron-like cells by safeguarding intestinal and germ cell identities (Kolundzic et al. 2018). Its role as a reprogramming barrier is conserved such that FACT depletion in human fibroblast culture enhanced reprogramming efficiency into both iPSCs and neurons (Kolundzic et al. 2018). FACT is a heterodimer consisting of two subunits: SUPT16H (suppressor of Ty 16 homolog, also known as SPT16) and SSRP1 (structure-specific recognition protein 1) in mammals (Orphanides et al. 1999). In C. elegans, SSRP1 has two homologs: HMG-3 and HMG-4, while SPT-16 is the single homolog of SPT-16 (Kolundzic et al. 2018). The existence of the two alternative FACT subunits HMG-3 and HMG-4 is the consequence of gene duplication, resulting in two functional paralogous proteins with distinct expression patterns: HMG-3 is expressed exclusively in the germline, while HMG-4 is expressed primarily in the soma (Kolundzic et al. 2018). Interestingly, SPT-16 also went through a gene duplication event, resulting in the uncharacterized pseudogene F55A3.7, which we named sspt-16 (short spt-16), because it lacks some genomic DNA pieces and an open reading frame when compared to the spt-16 gene locus (Figure 1A).
PY  - 2021
JO  - microPublication Biology
ER  -