Chromatin remodeling protein BPTF regulates transcriptional stability in planarian stem cells

BPTF is the largest subunit of the Nucleosome Remodeling Factor (NuRF) complex and is known to bind to histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation (H3K4me3). In planarians (specifically Schmidtea mediterranea), knockdown of bptf mimics the phenotype seen upon knockdown of H3K4me3 methyltransferase Set1. We hypothesized that BPTF mediates NuRF remodeling activity at Set1 targets. To test this hypothesis, we performed ATAC-seq on X1 stem cells (4n cycling cells as stained by Hoechst) isolated from both control worms (fed with dsRNA of the unc-22 gene sequence) and bptf RNAi worms (fed with dsRNA of the Smed-bptf gene sequence).