Linkage of pluripotent stem cell-associated transcripts to regulatory gene networks

Knowledge of the transcriptional circuitry responsible for pluripotentiality and self-renewal in embryonic stem cells is tantamount to understanding early mammalian development and a prerequisite to determining their therapeutic potential. Various techniques have employed genomics to identify transcripts that were abundant in stem cells, in an attempt to define the molecular basis of 'stemness'. In this study, we have extended traditional genomic analyses to identify cis-elements that might be implicated in the control of embryonic stem cell-restricted gene promoters. The strategy relied on the generation of a problem-specific list from serial analysis of gene expression profiles and subsequent promoter analyses to identify frameworks of multiple cis-elements conserved in space and orientation among genes from the problem-specific list. Subsequent experimental data suggest that 2 novel transcription factors, B-Myb and Maz, predicted from these models, are implicated either in the maintenance of the undifferentiated stem cell state or in early steps of differentiation.