Stress response factor ATF4 drives liver fibrosis by governing a stress-independent enhancer program to activate hepatic stellate cells

ATF4 promotes HSC activation and drives liver fibrosis independent of its canonical functions in stress signaling. Overall design: We used HSC human cell lines and HSC-specific conditional knockout mice to investigate the function of ATF4 in liver fibrosis. RNA sequencing and ChIP sequencing technologies were applied to investigate ATF4-targeted transcriptome and its chromatin binding.