Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Genetic conflict reflected in tissue-specific maps of genomic imprinting in human and mouse

  • Letter
  • Published:

From Nature Genetics

View current issue Submit your manuscript

Abstract

Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic process that restricts gene expression to either the maternally or paternally inherited allele1,2. Many theories have been proposed to explain its evolutionary origin3,4, but understanding has been limited by a paucity of data mapping the breadth and dynamics of imprinting within any organism. We generated an atlas of imprinting spanning 33 mouse and 45 human developmental stages and tissues. Nearly all imprinted genes were imprinted in early development and either retained their parent-of-origin expression in adults or lost it completely. Consistent with an evolutionary signature of parental conflict, imprinted genes were enriched for coexpressed pairs of maternally and paternally expressed genes, showed accelerated expression divergence between human and mouse, and were more highly expressed than their non-imprinted orthologs in other species. Our approach demonstrates a general framework for the discovery of imprinting in any species and sheds light on the causes and consequences of genomic imprinting in mammals.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Figure 1: Atlas of genomic imprinting in mouse.
Figure 2: Atlas of genomic imprinting in human.
Figure 3: Species comparisons of imprinting.

Similar content being viewed by others

Accession codes

Primary accessions

Sequence Read Archive

Referenced accessions

Gene Expression Omnibus

References

  1. Barlow, D.P. Gametic imprinting in mammals. Science 270, 1610–1613 (1995).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Barlow, D.P. & Bartolomei, M.S. Genomic imprinting in mammals. Cold Spring Harb. Perspect. Biol. 6, a018382 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Moore, T. & Haig, D. Genomic imprinting in mammalian development: a parental tug-of-war. Trends Genet. 7, 45–49 (1991).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Spencer, H.G. & Clark, A.G. Non-conflict theories for the evolution of genomic imprinting. Heredity (Edinb.) 113, 112–118 (2014).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Wilkins, J.F. & Haig, D. What good is genomic imprinting: the function of parent-specific gene expression. Nat. Rev. Genet. 4, 359–368 (2003).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Curley, J.P., Barton, S., Surani, A. & Keverne, E.B. Coadaptation in mother and infant regulated by a paternally expressed imprinted gene. Proc. Biol. Sci. 271, 1303–1309 (2004).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  7. Wolf, J.B. & Hager, R. A maternal-offspring coadaptation theory for the evolution of genomic imprinting. PLoS Biol. 4, e380 (2006).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Babak, T. Identification of imprinted loci by transcriptome sequencing. Methods Mol. Biol. 925, 79–88 (2012).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  9. Babak, T. et al. Global survey of genomic imprinting by transcriptome sequencing. Curr. Biol. 18, 1735–1741 (2008).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Wang, X. et al. Transcriptome-wide identification of novel imprinted genes in neonatal mouse brain. PLoS ONE 3, e3839 (2008).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. DeVeale, B., van der Kooy, D. & Babak, T. Critical evaluation of imprinted gene expression by RNA-Seq: a new perspective. PLoS Genet. 8, e1002600 (2012).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  12. Gregg, C. et al. High-resolution analysis of parent-of-origin allelic expression in the mouse brain. Science 329, 643–648 (2010).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  13. Tran, D.A., Bai, A.Y., Singh, P., Wu, X. & Szabo, P.E. Characterization of the imprinting signature of mouse embryo fibroblasts by RNA deep sequencing. Nucleic Acids Res. 42, 1772–1783 (2014).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  14. Calabrese, J.M. et al. Site-specific silencing of regulatory elements as a mechanism of X inactivation. Cell 151, 951–963 (2012).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  15. Wang, X., Soloway, P.D. & Clark, A.G. A survey for novel imprinted genes in the mouse placenta by mRNA-seq. Genetics 189, 109–122 (2011).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  16. Schulz, R. et al. WAMIDEX: a web atlas of murine genomic imprinting and differential expression. Epigenetics 3, 89–96 (2008).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Kim, J., Bergmann, A., Wehri, E., Lu, X. & Stubbs, L. Imprinting and evolution of two Kruppel-type zinc-finger genes, ZIM3 and ZNF264, located in the PEG3/USP29 imprinted domain. Genomics 77, 91–98 (2001).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  18. Morison, I.M., Ramsay, J.P. & Spencer, H.G. A census of mammalian imprinting. Trends Genet. 21, 457–465 (2005).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Morison, I.M., Paton, C.J. & Cleverley, S.D. The imprinted gene and parent-of-origin effect database. Nucleic Acids Res. 29, 275–276 (2001).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  20. Schaller, F. et al. A single postnatal injection of oxytocin rescues the lethal feeding behaviour in mouse newborns deficient for the imprinted Magel2 gene. Hum. Mol. Genet. 19, 4895–4905 (2010).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  21. GTEx Consortium. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. Nat. Genet. 45, 580–585 (2013).

  22. Fang, F. et al. Genomic landscape of human allele-specific DNA methylation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 7332–7337 (2012).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  23. Li, X. et al. Transcriptome sequencing of a large human family identifies the impact of rare noncoding variants. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 95, 245–256 (2014).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  24. Court, F. et al. Genome-wide parent-of-origin DNA methylation analysis reveals the intricacies of the human imprintome and suggests a germline methylation independent establishment of imprinting. Genome Res. 24, 554–569 (2014).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  25. Wilkins, J.F. & Haig, D. Parental modifiers, antisense transcripts and loss of imprinting. Proc. Biol. Sci. 269, 1841–1846 (2002).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  26. Wilkins, J.F. & Haig, D. Genomic imprinting of two antagonistic loci. Proc. Biol. Sci. 268, 1861–1867 (2001).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  27. Bischof, J.M., Stewart, C.L. & Wevrick, R. Inactivation of the mouse Magel2 gene results in growth abnormalities similar to Prader-Willi syndrome. Hum. Mol. Genet. 16, 2713–2719 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  28. Potes, C.S. & Lutz, T.A. Brainstem mechanisms of amylin-induced anorexia. Physiol. Behav. 100, 511–518 (2010).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  29. Wutz, A. et al. Non-imprinted Igf2r expression decreases growth and rescues the Tme mutation in mice. Development 128, 1881–1887 (2001).

    CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  30. Tzouanacou, E., Tweedie, S. & Wilson, V. Identification of Jade1, a gene encoding a PHD zinc finger protein, in a gene trap mutagenesis screen for genes involved in anteroposterior axis development. Mol. Cell. Biol. 23, 8553–8562 (2003).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  31. Pereira, V., Waxman, D. & Eyre-Walker, A. A problem with the correlation coefficient as a measure of gene expression divergence. Genetics 183, 1597–1600 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  32. Renfree, M.B., Hore, T.A., Shaw, G., Graves, J.A. & Pask, A.J. Evolution of genomic imprinting: insights from marsupials and monotremes. Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 10, 241–262 (2009).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  33. Xie, W. et al. Base-resolution analyses of sequence and parent-of-origin dependent DNA methylation in the mouse genome. Cell 148, 816–831 (2012).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  34. Parkhomchuk, D. et al. Transcriptome analysis by strand-specific sequencing of complementary DNA. Nucleic Acids Res. 37, e123 (2009).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  35. Frazer, K.A. et al. A sequence-based variation map of 8.27 million SNPs in inbred mouse strains. Nature 448, 1050–1053 (2007).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  36. Keane, T.M. et al. Mouse genomic variation and its effect on phenotypes and gene regulation. Nature 477, 289–294 (2011).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  37. Grubb, S.C., Bult, C.J. & Bogue, M.A. Mouse phenome database. Nucleic Acids Res. 42, D825–D834 (2014).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  38. Ashburner, M. et al. Gene ontology: tool for the unification of biology. The Gene Ontology Consortium. Nat. Genet. 25, 25–29 (2000).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  39. Croft, D. et al. The Reactome pathway knowledgebase. Nucleic Acids Res. 42, D472–D477 (2014).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  40. Guberman, J.M. et al. BioMart Central Portal: an open database network for the biological community. Database (Oxford) 2011, bar041 (2011).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Delaneau, O., Zagury, J.F. & Marchini, J. Improved whole-chromosome phasing for disease and population genetic studies. Nat. Methods 10, 5–6 (2013).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  42. Zhang, R. et al. Quantifying RNA allelic ratios by microfluidic multiplex PCR and sequencing. Nat. Methods 11, 51–54 (2014).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  43. Brawand, D. et al. The evolution of gene expression levels in mammalian organs. Nature 478, 343–348 (2011).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank members of the Fraser laboratory for critical evaluation of the manuscript. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant 1R01GM097171-01A1. H.B.F. is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. The work of S.B.M. and J.B.L. was supported by US NIH grant U01HG007593. E.K.T. was supported by a Hewlett-Packard Stanford Graduate Fellowship. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by US National Science Foundation grant OCI-1053575. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project was supported by the Common Fund of the Office of the Director of the US NIH. Additional GTEx funds were provided by the National Cancer Institute, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Donors were enrolled at Biospecimen Source Sites funded by National Cancer Institute/SAIC-Frederick, Inc. subcontracts to the National Disease Research Interchange (10XS170), the Roswell Park Cancer Institute (10XS171) and Science Care, Inc. (X10S172). The Laboratory, Data Analysis and Coordinating Center (LDACC) was funded through a contract (HHSN268201000029C) to the Broad Institute. Biorepository operations were funded through an SAIC-Frederick subcontract to the Van Andel Institute (10ST1035). Additional data repository and project management were provided by SAIC-Frederick (HHSN261200800001E). The Brain Bank was supported by a supplement to University of Miami grant DA006227. Statistical Methods development grants were made to the University of Geneva (MH090941), the University of Chicago (MH090951 and MH090937), the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (MH090936) and Harvard University (MH090948).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

B.D. and D.v.d.K. generated the mouse crosses and performed the dissections. T.B., Y.Z. and B.D. performed the mouse RNA-seq experiments. E.K.T., K.S.S., K.R.K., R.Z., J.B.L. and S.B.M. performed the human ASE validation by mmPCR-seq. X.L. and S.B.M. contributed the pedigree data. T.B. performed the analysis. T.B. and H.B.F. wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to reading and editing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hunter B Fraser.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–24 and Supplementary Note. (PDF 34475 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Detailed annotation of the biological samples and input data used to generate the imprinting atlas in mouse. (XLSX 21 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

Detailed annotation of the pyrosequencing validation effort in mouse. Included are assay design (heterozygous SNPs, biological samples targeted, primer sequences), a summary of raw outputs and validation calls. (XLS 113 kb)

Supplementary Table 3

Novel mouse and human imprinted genes discovered in this study. (XLSX 29 kb)

Supplementary Table 4

Detailed ASE expression and literature evidence for 23 genes for which we did not observe imprinting that were previously reported to be imprinted. (XLSX 11 kb)

Supplementary Table 5

Summary of the functional enrichments among similarly imprinted sets of genes in mouse. Databases used included Gene Ontology, KEGG pathways, Genego pathways and the JAX Phenome Database. KEGG and Genego pathways were based on human annotation and were mapped to mouse via Ensembl orthologs. Similarly imprinted genes were selected manually as obvious clusters from Figure 1. (XLSX 26 kb)

Supplementary Table 6

Detailed annotation of the samples and input GTEx.v3 data used to generate the imprinting atlas in human. A summary of the number of individuals sequenced for each tissue is also included. The majority of this table was downloaded directly from the Sequence Read Archive. (XLSX 467 kb)

Supplementary Table 7

mmPCR-seq primer design details. (XLSX 16 kb)

Supplementary Table 8

Summary of functional enrichments among similarly imprinted sets of genes in human. The databases used included Gene Ontology, KEGG pathways and Genego pathways. Similarly imprinted genes were selected manually as obvious clusters from Figure 1. (XLSX 26 kb)

Supplementary Table 9

The most significant mouse co-expression pairwise gene interactions. MMPP, maternal-maternal or paternal-paternal interaction; MPPM, maternal-paternal or paternal-maternal interaction. Human Euclidean distances of imprinted orthologs are shown in the second tab. (XLSX 11 kb)

Supplementary Data Set

Supplementary Data Set (XLSX 10251 kb)

Source data

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Babak, T., DeVeale, B., Tsang, E. et al. Genetic conflict reflected in tissue-specific maps of genomic imprinting in human and mouse. Nat Genet 47, 544–549 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3274

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3274

  • Springer Nature America, Inc.

Navigation