Impact of human MLL/COMPASS and Polycomb complexes on the DNA methylome [expression array]

The association of DNA CpG methylation (or its absence) with occupancy of histone post translational modifications has hinted at an underlying crosstalk between histone marks and DNA methylation in patterning the human methylome, an idea supported by corresponding alterations to both histone marks and DNA methylation during malignant transformation. This study investigated the framework by which histone marks influence DNA methylation. Using RNAi in a human pluripotent embryonic carcinoma cell line we depleted essential components of the histone modifying complexes that establish the posttranslational modifications H3K4me3, H3K27me3, and H2AK119ub, and we assayed the impact of the subsequent loss of these marks on the DNA methylome. Absence of H2AK119ub resulted predominantly in hypomethylation across the genome. Removal of H3K4me3 or, surprisingly, H3K27me3 caused CpG island hypermethylation at a subset of loci. Intriguingly, many promoters were co-regulated by all three histone marks, becoming hypermethylated with loss of H3K4me3 or H3K27me3 and becoming hypomethylated with depletion of H2AK119ub, and many of these co-regulated loci were among those that are commonly, aberrantly hypermethylated in cancer.

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Putiri EL, Tiedemann RL, Liu C, Choi JH, Robertson KD