lincRNAs act in the circuitry controlling pluripotency and differentiation. Mus musculus

While thousands of large intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) have been identified in mammals, few have been functionally characterized leading to debate about their biological role. To address this, we performed loss-of-function studies on most lincRNAs expressed in mouse embryonic stem cells (ESC) and characterized the effects on gene expression. Here we show that knockdown of lincRNAs have major consequences on gene expression patterns, comparable to knockdown of well-known ESC regulators. Notably, lincRNAs primarily affect gene expression in trans. We identify dozens of lincRNAs whose knockdown causes an exit from the pluripotent state or upregulation of lineage commitment programs. We integrate lincRNAs into the molecular circuitry of ESCs and show that lincRNA genes are regulated by key transcription factors and that lincRNA transcripts physically bind to multiple chromatin regulatory proteins to affect shared gene expression programs. Together, the results demonstrate that lincRNAs have key roles in the circuitry controlling ESC state. Overall design: We generated five lentiviral-based shRNAs targeting each of the 237 lincRNAs previously identified in ESCs. These shRNAs successfully targeted 147 lincRNAs and reduced their expression by an average of ~75% compared to endogenous levels in ESCs. As positive controls, we generated shRNAs targeting ~50 genes encoding regulatory proteins, including both transcription factor and chromatin factor genes that have been shown to play critical roles in ESC regulation; we obtained validated hairpins against 40 of these genes. As negative controls, we performed independent infections with lentiviruses containing 27 different shRNAs with no known cellular target RNA.