DATE: May 3, 2018

TIME: 11:00AM PDT, 2:00PM EDT

While stress is one of the leading causes of neuropsychiatric disorders, the molecular underpinnings of how stress induces alterations in brain chemistry leading to mental illness remains poorly understood. Thus, my research has focused on the novel environmentally sensitive DNA methylation mark 5-hydryoxymethycytosine (5hmC) which is highly enriched in the brain, sensitive to stress, and associated with active neuronal transcription.

During my dissertation work, we have:

• Observed that stress causes a significant increase in 5hmC levels on the important stress related glucocorticoid receptor gene (Nr3c1).
• Demonstrated that genome profiling of 5hmC revealed stress-related disruptions across the whole genome, and genes containing differentially hydroxylmethylated regions (DhMR) exhibited significant enrichment in neuronal pathways, suggesting biological relevance.
• Identified genes with changes in both 5hmC levels and gene expression through subsequent overlapping with RNA-Seq data from the same mice/brain tissue.
• Discovered an enrichment of known binding sites for transcription factors, suggesting that 5hmC may regulate gene expression by mediating transcription factor binding in both males and females.

With this information at hand, using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) from a limited amount of brain tissue, we showed that stress resulted in a significant decrease in the binding of a transcription factor to one of the candidate genes with the highest altered 5hmC level due to stress. We further supported our ChIP-qPCR findings using electrophoretic shift assay (EMSA) and western blot. Together, the data from these molecular analyses suggest that 5hmC alters TF binding in response to stress.

In this webinar, the speaker will:

• Discuss research background and present ChIP-qPCR, RNA-Seq, and EMSA data.
• Provide tips on performing ChIP with low amounts of frozen brain tissue, a very difficult tissue type to process.
• Describe how to minimize tissue loss and the importance of formaldehyde fixation in ChIP.
• How using Covaris AFA and tissue ChIP protocol helped me in my research.