Abstract
Both metabolic switch from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis (OGS) and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) promote cellular reprogramming at early stages. However, their connections have not been elucidated. Here, when a chemically defined medium was used to induce early EMT during mouse reprogramming, a facilitated OGS was also observed at the same time. Additional investigations suggested that the two events formed a positive feedback loop via transcriptional activation, cooperated to upregulate epigenetic factors such as Bmi1, Ctcf, Ezh2, Kdm2b, and Wdr5, and accelerated pluripotency induction at the early stage. However, at late stages, by over‐inducing glycolysis and preventing the necessary mesenchymal–epithelial transition, the two events trapped the cells at a new pluripotency state between naïve and primed states and inhibited further reprogramming toward the naïve state. In addition, the pluripotent stem cells at the new state have high similarity to epiblasts from E4.5 and E5.5 embryos, and have distinct characteristics from the previously reported epiblast‐like or formative states. Therefore, the time‐dependent cooperation between OGS and EMT in regulating pluripotency should extend our understanding of related fields.
Highlights
Both metabolic switch from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis (OGS) and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) promote cellular reprogramming at early stages
The chemically defined 5C medium (Dataset EV1) was used after simultaneously introducing Oct4, Klf4, c-Myc, and Sox2 into OG2 transgenic mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) (Szabo et al, 2002). 5C medium induced approximately twofold more Oct4GFP+ colonies than conventional mES medium (Fig 1A and B)
Since sequential EMT-Mesenchymal–epithelial transition (MET) has been extensively discussed during embryonic development and cancer development (Chaffer et al, 2007; Thiery et al, 2009), we hypothesize that early EMT poises the cells in a state that is beneficial for subsequent cell fate conversions (Liu et al, 2013; Li et al, 2014b)
Summary
Both metabolic switch from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis (OGS) and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) promote cellular reprogramming at early stages. When a chemically defined medium was used to induce early EMT during mouse reprogramming, a facilitated OGS was observed at the same time. Additional investigations suggested that the two events formed a positive feedback loop via transcriptional activation, cooperated to upregulate epigenetic factors such as Bmi, Ctcf, Ezh, Kdm2b, and Wdr, and accelerated pluripotency induction at the early stage. At late stages, by over-inducing glycolysis and preventing the necessary mesenchymal–epithelial transition, the two events trapped the cells at a new pluripotency state between naïve and primed states and inhibited further reprogramming toward the naïve state. The time-dependent cooperation between OGS and EMT in regulating pluripotency should extend our understanding of related fields
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