Cross-Study Comparison of Oct4 Target Genes

Comparison of validated Oct4 targets to previous studies employing ChIP-Pet, ChIP-ChIP and expression analysis following Oct4 knockdown or overexpression. Discordant findings in the ChIP based approaches may be explained by the use of promoter based chips or stringency of analysis. Although shRNA knockdown of Oct4 reveals few genes that are predicted to be bona fide Oct4 targets that are identified in common, comparison to the dataset in Matoba et el. [27] reveals that expression of most of the targets identified in this study are in fact perturbed upon up or downregulation of Oct4. Discordant findings between this study and Matoba et al. may be impacted by the temporal nature of Oct4 regulation of these target genes as has been described previously for the Rest regulon (Sun et al. [34]).