Identification of Chromatin Accessibility During The Early Stage of Pig SCNT Embryo Reprogramming by ATAC-Seq

Abstract Background: Somatic cell nuclear transplantation (SCNT) can transform highly differentiated donor nuclei into pluripotent nuclei through the large-scale reprogramming of chromatin. The reprogramming of chromatin has been documented to take place in the first few hours after SCNT embryo activation. Thus, studies that characterize dynamic changes in chromatin during the first few hours after embryo activation could provide insight into the mechanism and significance of genome-wide reprogramming. However, few studies have examined the epigenetic remodeling of reconstructed embryos during the early stage of reprogramming.Results: We conducted ATAC-seq on 50 porcine SCNT-HMC embryos and 50 parthenogenetic activation (PA) embryos 10 h after activation. Along with pig embryonic fibroblast (PEF) ATAC-seq data, we found low levels of chromatin accessibility and gene transcription in SCNT and PA embryos. Moreover, PEF genes and the X chromosome became inaccessible during embryo reprogramming. GO enrichment analysis revealed that the molecular functions related to accessible chromatin in embryos primarily included transcriptional regulatory activity and SMAD binding. The differentially accessible chromatin sites between SCNT and PEF were primarily related to transcriptional activity and histone modification.Conclusions: Despite the tight chromatin structure during the early stage of embryo reprogramming, some accessible chromatin sites, which were primarily distributed in the intergenic region, were still detected. Dynamic changes in chromatin accessibility during reprogramming were primarily related to transcriptional activity and histone modification. Generally, this study provided new insight into the dynamics and importance of chromatin accessibility during the early stages of embryo reprogramming.