Transcriptomic and epigenetic disruptions in excitatory neurons in Dnmt3a conditional knockout mouse

We created a mouse line in which deletion of exon 19 of Dnmt3a is driven by the Neurod6 promoter (also known as Nex-Cre line). In this conditional knockout (cKO), Dnmt3a is functionally ablated in excitatory neurons in the neocortex and hippocampus starting in mid/late gestation (~E13-15). With an affinity purification approach to isolate tagged nuclei in mice (similar to INTACT; [Deal R.B. and Henikoff S. A simple method for gene expression and chromatin profiling of individual cell types within a tissue. Dev. Cell 18,1030-1040. (2010)]), we characterized the genome-wide patterns of transcription, DNA methylation, and histone modifications in excitatory pyramidal neurons of the frontal cortex from the Dnmt3a cKO and control mice. Our data provide a detailed assessment of the molecular basis of the accompanying changes of neurophysiological and behavioral phenotypes in the cKO mice, and suggest a complex interaction between DNA methylation and Polycomb-mediated repression in the epigenetic regulation in developing brain cells. RNA-seq, MethylC-seq and ChIP-seq for histone modifications using INTACT-purified nuclei of excitatory pyramidal neurons from the mouse frontal cortex