Genome-wide analysis of histone acetylation dynamics during mouse embryonic stem cell neural differentiation

Epigenetic modification as an intrinsic fine-tune program cooperates with key transcription factors to regulate the cell fate determination. The histone acetylation participating in neural differentiation of pluripotent stem cells is expected but not well studied. Here, using acetylated histone H3 ChIP-sequencing (ChIP-seq), we demonstrate that the histone H3 acetylation level is gradually increased on the neural gene loci while decreased on the neural-inhibitory gene loci during mouse embryonic stem cell (mESC) neural differentiation. We further show that histone deacetylase 1 (HDAC1) is essential for neural commitment by targeting Nodal signaling. Thus, our study reveals a mechanism by which the epigenetic modification of histone acetylation/deacetylation interacts with extracellular signaling in mESC neural fate determination. Data were deposited in Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets under reference number GSE66025.