Description
Propose: We used next-generation RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to characterize the transcriptional changes in primary human melanocytes during recessive Cole disease. Our patient carried missense mutation in the ENPP1 gene (c.358T>C; p.C120R). RNA-seq was performed using mRNA extracted from primary hypo- and hyper-pigmented melanocytes isolated from affected patient and melanocytes from his healthy heterozygous sibling and an aged- and ethnicity-matched control. Results: A pairwise fold-change comparison was performed and genes were computationally filtered using a cutoff of more than 2 fold change and P<0.01. We first compared hyper-pigmented melanocytes to each control individually and then overlapped the results to obtain a list of 1041 up-regulated and 692 down-regulated genes. The same analysis was done for hypo-pigmented melanocytes to found that 535 genes were up-regulated and 520 were down-regulated. Finally, to obtain a profile of the overall differential gene expression, down-regulated genes in hyper and hypo-pigmented cells were overlapped to identify 143 genes that were down-regulated in patient melanocytes compared to controls regardless of pigmentation status. Similar analysis was performed to obtain the list of 172 up-regulated genes. We selected 36 deregulated genes, most of which were associated with melanocyte development and pigmentation signaling pathways, and validated 32 of them by Q-PCR, indicating that our RNA-Seq data was accurate and reliable. Conclusion: Our study represents the first analysis of hypo- and hyper-pigmented primary melanocytes isolated from affected patient versus healthy controls in recessive Cole disese pathology. Overall design: mRNA profiles of hyper- and hypo-pigmented mutant melanocytes, heterozygous and wild type melanocytes were sequenced in triplicate on the Hiseq 2500 High output 100PE