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Disentangling cell-intrinsic and extrinsic factors underlying gene expression evolution

ABSTRACT: Chimeras have played a foundational role in biology, for example by enabling the classification of developmental processes into those driven intrinsically by individual cells versus those driven extrinsically by their extracellular environment. Here, we extend this framework to decompose evolutionary divergence in gene expression and other quantitative traits into cell-intrinsic, extrinsic, and intrinsic-extrinsic interaction components. Applying this framework to reciprocal rat-mouse chimeras, we found that the majority of gene expression divergence is attributable to cell-intrinsic factors, though extrinsic factors also play an integral role. For example, a rat-like extracellular environment extrinsically up-regulates the expression of a key transcriptional regulator of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response in some but not all cell types, which in turn strongly predicts extrinsic up-regulation of its target genes and of the ER stress response pathway as a whole. This effect is also seen at the protein level for both genes we tested, suggesting propagation through multiple regulatory levels. We also demonstrate that our framework is applicable to a cellular trait, neuronal differentiation, and estimated the intrinsic and extrinsic contributions to its divergence. Finally, we show that many imprinted genes are dramatically mis-expressed in species-mismatched environments, suggesting that mismatch between rapidly evolving intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms controlling gene imprinting may contribute to barriers to interspecies chimerism. Overall, our conceptual framework opens up new avenues to investigate the mechanistic basis of evolutionary divergence in gene expression and other quantitative traits in any multicellular organism.

ORGANISM(S): Mus musculus x Rattus norvegicus

PROVIDER: GSE266218 | GEO | 2024/05/10

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:The tongue is a muscular organ in the vertebrate oral cavity that performs complex functions in daily life, including feeding and phonetic articulation. The tongue consists of mesenchyme cells of two distinct origins: the muscle cells are derived from occipital somites whereas the tendons and other connective tissues derived from the cranial neural crest. Cranial neural crest cells are important for the initiation of tongue swelling and proper patterning of intrinsic and extrinsic tongue muscle groups. However, little is known regarding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of tongue morphogenesis. We show that the odd-skipped related 1 (Osr1) transcription factor exhibits dynamic expression in the tongue mesenchyme during early tongue development. Tissue-specific inactivation of Osr1 in the early neural crest cells resulted in ectopic cartilage formation in the mouse tongue. We show that Sox9, the master regulator of chondrocyte differentiation, is initially widely expressed in the neural crest derived mesenchyme in the tongue and subsequently down-regulated concomitant by up-regulation of Osr1 expression. Osr1 mutant embryos exhibit persistent expression of Sox9 and chondrocyte differentiation from the neural crest derived tongue mesenchyme. Further biochemical analyses indicate that Osr1 may directly suppresses Sox9 gene expression in the tongue mesenchyme. These data reveal a novel mechanism in suppression of chondrogenic fate during tongue development. Remarkably, the ectopic cartilage in the Osr1 mutant mice resembles the entoglossal cartilage naturally develops in the avian tongue. These results suggest that modulation of expression of Osr1 may underline the evolutionary divergence in tongue cartilage formation. RNAs were isolated from microdissected E12 embryonic mouse tongue of Osr1f/-;Wnt1cre and control littermates and characterized by RNAseq E12 mouse embryonic tongues were micro-dissceted, 3 pairs of control and mutant samples were pooled for the RNA extraction

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Disentangling cell-intrinsic and extrinsic factors underlying gene expression evolution

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