Deciphering the relationship between polycomb repression and stochastic gene expression from single-cell RNA-seq data

Polycomb repressive complexes are important histone modifiers, which silence gene expression, yet there exists a subset of polycomb-bound genes actively transcribed by RNA polymerase II. To investigate the switching between polycomb-repressed and active states, we sequence mRNA from OS25 mouse embryonic stem cells cultured in serum/LIF. To validate our finding that polycomb modulates stochastic gene expression and transcriptional bursting, we perform knockout experiments and we sequence mRNA from Ring1A knockout (untreated) and Ring1A/B double knockout cells with constitutive Ring1A knockout and tamoxifen-inducible conditional Ring1B knockout.