Progressive methylation of POU5F1 regulatory regions during blastocyst development

Abstract

ThePOU5F1gene encodes one of the ‘core’ transcription factors necessary to establish and maintain pluripotency in mammals. Its function depends on its precise level of expression, so its transcription has to be tightly regulated. To date, few conserved functional elements have been identified in its 5′ regulatory region: a distal and a proximal enhancer, and a minimal promoter, epigenetic modifications of which interfere withPOU5F1expression and function inin vitro-derived cell lines. Also, its permanent inactivation in differentiated cells depends onde novomethylation of its promoter. However, little is known about the epigenetic regulation ofPOU5F1expression in the embryo itself. We used the rabbit blastocyst as a model to analyze the methylation dynamics of thePOU5F15′ upstream region, relative to its regulated expression in different compartments of the blastocyst over a 2-day period of development. We evidenced progressive methylation of the 5′ regulatory region and the first exon accompanying differentiation and the gradual repression ofPOU5F1. Methylation started in the early trophectoderm before complete transcriptional inactivation. Interestingly, the distal enhancer, which is known to be active in naïve pluripotent cells only, retained a very low level of methylation in primed pluripotent epiblasts and remained less methylated in differentiated compartments than the proximal enhancer. This detailed study identified CpGs with the greatest variations in methylation, as well as groups of CpGs showing a highly correlated behavior, during differentiation. Moreover, our findings evidenced few CpGs with very specific behavior during this period of development.