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- Altmae, S, et al.
(författare)
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Meta-signature of human endometrial receptivity: a meta-analysis and validation study of transcriptomic biomarkers
- 2017
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 7:1, s. 10077-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Previous transcriptome studies of the human endometrium have revealed hundreds of simultaneously up- and down-regulated genes that are involved in endometrial receptivity. However, the overlap between the studies is relatively small, and we are still searching for potential diagnostic biomarkers. Here we perform a meta-analysis of endometrial-receptivity associated genes on 164 endometrial samples (76 from ‘pre-receptive’ and 88 from mid-secretory, ‘receptive’ phase endometria) using a robust rank aggregation (RRA) method, followed by enrichment analysis, and regulatory microRNA prediction. We identify a meta-signature of endometrial receptivity involving 57 mRNA genes as putative receptivity markers, where 39 of these we confirm experimentally using RNA-sequencing method in two separate datasets. The meta-signature genes highlight the importance of immune responses, the complement cascade pathway and the involvement of exosomes in mid-secretory endometrial functions. Bioinformatic prediction identifies 348 microRNAs that could regulate 30 endometrial-receptivity associated genes, and we confirm experimentally the decreased expression of 19 microRNAs with 11 corresponding up-regulated meta-signature genes in our validation experiments. The 57 identified meta-signature genes and involved pathways, together with their regulatory microRNAs could serve as promising and sought-after biomarkers of endometrial receptivity, fertility and infertility.
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- Madissoon, E, et al.
(författare)
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Pleomorphic Adenoma Gene 1 Is Needed For Timely Zygotic Genome Activation and Early Embryo Development
- 2019
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 9:1, s. 8411-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Pleomorphic adenoma gene 1 (PLAG1) is a transcription factor involved in cancer and growth. We discovered a de novo DNA motif containing a PLAG1 binding site in the promoters of genes activated during zygotic genome activation (ZGA) in human embryos. This motif was located within an Alu element in a region that was conserved in the murine B1 element. We show that maternally provided Plag1 is needed for timely mouse preimplantation embryo development. Heterozygous mouse embryos lacking maternal Plag1 showed disrupted regulation of 1,089 genes, spent significantly longer time in the 2-cell stage, and started expressing Plag1 ectopically from the paternal allele. The de novo PLAG1 motif was enriched in the promoters of the genes whose activation was delayed in the absence of Plag1. Further, these mouse genes showed a significant overlap with genes upregulated during human ZGA that also contain the motif. By gene ontology, the mouse and human ZGA genes with de novo PLAG1 motifs were involved in ribosome biogenesis and protein synthesis. Collectively, our data suggest that PLAG1 affects embryo development in mice and humans through a conserved DNA motif within Alu/B1 elements located in the promoters of a subset of ZGA genes.
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- Purhonen, J, et al.
(författare)
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Ketogenic diet attenuates hepatopathy in mouse model of respiratory chain complex III deficiency caused by a Bcs1l mutation
- 2017
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 7:1, s. 957-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Mitochondrial disorders are among the most prevalent inborn errors of metabolism but largely lack treatments and have poor outcomes. High-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets (KDs) have shown beneficial effects in mouse models of mitochondrial myopathies, with induction of mitochondrial biogenesis as the suggested main mechanism. We fed KD to mice with respiratory chain complex III (CIII) deficiency and progressive hepatopathy due to mutated BCS1L, a CIII assembly factor. The mutant mice became persistently ketotic and tolerated the KD for up to 11 weeks. Liver disease progression was attenuated by KD as shown by delayed fibrosis, reduced cell death, inhibition of hepatic progenitor cell response and stellate cell activation, and normalization of liver enzyme activities. Despite no clear signs of increased mitochondrial biogenesis in the liver, CIII assembly and activity were improved and mitochondrial morphology in hepatocytes normalized. Induction of hepatic glutathione transferase genes and elevated total glutathione level were normalized by KD. Histological findings and transcriptome changes indicated modulation of liver macrophage populations by the mutation and the diet. These results reveal a striking beneficial hepatic response to KD in mice with mitochondrial hepatopathy and warrant further investigations of dietary modification in the management of these conditions in patients.
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- Teder, H, et al.
(författare)
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TAC-seq: targeted DNA and RNA sequencing for precise biomarker molecule counting
- 2018
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Ingår i: NPJ genomic medicine. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2056-7944. ; 3, s. 34-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods have become essential in medical research and diagnostics. In addition to NGS sensitivity and high-throughput capacity, precise biomolecule counting based on unique molecular identifier (UMI) has potential to increase biomolecule detection accuracy. Although UMIs are widely used in basic research its introduction to clinical assays is still in progress. Here, we present a robust and cost-effective TAC-seq (Targeted Allele Counting by sequencing) method that uses UMIs to estimate the original molecule counts of mRNAs, microRNAs, and cell-free DNA. We applied TAC-seq in three different clinical applications and compared the results with standard NGS. RNA samples extracted from human endometrial biopsies were analyzed using previously described 57 mRNA-based receptivity biomarkers and 49 selected microRNAs at different expression levels. Cell-free DNA aneuploidy testing was based on cell line (47,XX, +21) genomic DNA. TAC-seq mRNA profiling showed identical clustering results to transcriptome RNA sequencing, and microRNA detection demonstrated significant reduction in amplification bias, allowing to determine minor expression changes between different samples that remained undetermined by standard NGS. The mimicking experiment for cell-free DNA fetal aneuploidy analysis showed that TAC-seq can be applied to count highly fragmented DNA, detecting significant (p = 7.6 × 10−4) excess of chromosome 21 molecules at 10% fetal fraction level. Based on three proof-of-principle applications we demonstrate that TAC-seq is an accurate and highly potential biomarker profiling method for advanced medical research and diagnostics.
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- Jouhilahti, EM, et al.
(författare)
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The human PRD-like homeobox gene LEUTX has a central role in embryo genome activation
- 2016
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Ingår i: Development (Cambridge, England). - : The Company of Biologists. - 1477-9129 .- 0950-1991. ; 143:19, s. 3459-3469
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Leucine twenty homeobox gene (LEUTX) is a PAIRED (PRD)-like homeobox gene that is expressed nearly exclusively in human preimplantation embryos. We previously identified a novel transcription start site for the predicted human LEUTX gene based on the transcriptional analysis of human preimplantation embryos. The novel variant encodes a protein with a complete homeodomain. Here we provide a detailed description of the molecular cloning of the complete homeodomain-containing LEUTX. Using a human embryonic stem cell overexpression model we show that the complete homeodomain isoform is functional and sufficient to activate the transcription of a large fraction of the genes found upregulated in human embryo genome activation, whereas the previously predicted partial homeodomain isoform is largely inactive. Another PRD-like transcription factor, DPRX, appears as a powerful repressor of transcription. We propose a two-stage model of human EGA in which LEUTX acts as a transcriptional activator at 4-cell stage, and DPRX as a balancing repressor at 8-cell stage. We conclude that LEUTX is a candidate regulator of human embryo genome activation.
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- Krjutskov, K, et al.
(författare)
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Globin mRNA reduction for whole-blood transcriptome sequencing
- 2016
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 6, s. 31584-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The transcriptome analysis of whole-blood RNA by sequencing holds promise for the identification and tracking of biomarkers; however, the high globin mRNA (gmRNA) content of erythrocytes hampers whole-blood and buffy coat analyses. We introduce a novel gmRNA locking assay (GlobinLock, GL) as a robust and simple gmRNA reduction tool to preserve RNA quality, save time and cost. GL consists of a pair of gmRNA-specific oligonucleotides in RNA initial denaturation buffer that is effective immediately after RNA denaturation and adds only ten minutes of incubation to the whole cDNA synthesis procedure when compared to non-blood RNA analysis. We show that GL is fully effective not only for human samples but also for mouse and rat and so far incompletely studied cow, dog and zebrafish.
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| 26. |
- Madissoon, E, et al.
(författare)
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Characterization and target genes of nine human PRD-like homeobox domain genes expressed exclusively in early embryos
- 2016
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 6, s. 28995-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- PAIRED (PRD)-like homeobox genes belong to a class of predicted transcription factor genes. Several of these PRD-like homeobox genes have been predicted in silico from genomic sequence but until recently had no evidence of transcript expression. We found recently that nine PRD-like homeobox genes, ARGFX, CPHX1, CPHX2, DPRX, DUXA, DUXB, NOBOX, TPRX1 and TPRX2, were expressed in human preimplantation embryos. In the current study we characterized these PRD-like homeobox genes in depth and studied their functions as transcription factors. We cloned multiple transcript variants from human embryos and showed that the expression of these genes is specific to embryos and pluripotent stem cells. Overexpression of the genes in human embryonic stem cells confirmed their roles as transcription factors as either activators (CPHX1, CPHX2, ARGFX) or repressors (DPRX, DUXA, TPRX2) with distinct targets that could be explained by the amino acid sequence in homeodomain. Some PRD-like homeodomain transcription factors had high concordance of target genes and showed enrichment for both developmentally important gene sets and a 36 bp DNA recognition motif implicated in Embryo Genome Activation (EGA). Our data implicate a role for these previously uncharacterized PRD-like homeodomain proteins in the regulation of human embryo genome activation and preimplantation embryo development.
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| 29. |
- Sauk, M, et al.
(författare)
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NIPTmer: rapid k-mer-based software package for detection of fetal aneuploidies
- 2018
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 8:1, s. 5616-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is a recent and rapidly evolving method for detecting genetic lesions, such as aneuploidies, of a fetus. However, there is a need for faster and cheaper laboratory and analysis methods to make NIPT more widely accessible. We have developed a novel software package for detection of fetal aneuploidies from next-generation low-coverage whole genome sequencing data. Our tool – NIPTmer – is based on counting pre-defined per-chromosome sets of unique k-mers from raw sequencing data, and applying linear regression model on the counts. Additionally, the filtering process used for k-mer list creation allows one to take into account the genetic variance in a specific sample, thus reducing the source of uncertainty. The processing time of one sample is less than 10 CPU-minutes on a high-end workstation. NIPTmer was validated on a cohort of 583 NIPT samples and it correctly predicted 37 non-mosaic fetal aneuploidies. NIPTmer has the potential to reduce significantly the time and complexity of NIPT post-sequencing analysis compared to mapping-based methods. For non-commercial users the software package is freely available at http://bioinfo.ut.ee/NIPTMer/.
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| 30. |
- Vakkilainen, S, et al.
(författare)
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The human long non-coding RNA gene RMRP has pleiotropic effects and regulates cell-cycle progression at G2
- 2019
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Ingår i: Scientific reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 9:1, s. 13758-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- RMRP was the first non-coding nuclear RNA gene implicated in a disease. Its mutations cause cartilage-hair hypoplasia (CHH), an autosomal recessive skeletal dysplasia with growth failure, immunodeficiency, and a high risk for malignancies. This study aimed to gain further insight into the role of RNA Component of Mitochondrial RNA Processing Endoribonuclease (RMRP) in cellular physiology and disease pathogenesis. We combined transcriptome analysis with single-cell analysis using fibroblasts from CHH patients and healthy controls. To directly assess cell cycle progression, we followed CHH fibroblasts by pulse-labeling and time-lapse microscopy. Transcriptome analysis identified 35 significantly upregulated and 130 downregulated genes in CHH fibroblasts. The downregulated genes were significantly connected to the cell cycle. Multiple other pathways, involving regulation of apoptosis, bone and cartilage formation, and lymphocyte function, were also affected, as well as PI3K-Akt signaling. Cell-cycle studies indicated that the CHH cells were delayed specifically in the passage from G2 phase to mitosis. Our findings expand the mechanistic understanding of CHH, indicate possible pathways for therapeutic intervention and add to the limited understanding of the functions of RMRP.
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| 31. |
- Weltner, J, et al.
(författare)
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Human pluripotent reprogramming with CRISPR activators
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature communications. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2041-1723. ; 9:1, s. 2643-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- CRISPR-Cas9-based gene activation (CRISPRa) is an attractive tool for cellular reprogramming applications due to its high multiplexing capacity and direct targeting of endogenous loci. Here we present the reprogramming of primary human skin fibroblasts into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) using CRISPRa, targeting endogenous OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, MYC, and LIN28A promoters. The low basal reprogramming efficiency can be improved by an order of magnitude by additionally targeting a conserved Alu-motif enriched near genes involved in embryo genome activation (EEA-motif). This effect is mediated in part by more efficient activation of NANOG and REX1. These data demonstrate that human somatic cells can be reprogrammed into iPSCs using only CRISPRa. Furthermore, the results unravel the involvement of EEA-motif-associated mechanisms in cellular reprogramming.
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