Endothelial gene expression analysis after silencing LOXL2 using siRNAs

Impaired or excessive growth of endothelial cells contributes to several diseases. However, the functional involvement of regulatory long non-coding RNAs in these processes is not well defined. Here we show that the long non-coding antisense transcript of GATA6 (GATA6-AS) interacts with the epigenetic regulator LOXL2 to regulates endothelial gene expression via changes in histone methylation. Using RNA deep sequencing, we find that GATA6-AS is up-regulated in endothelial cells during hypoxia. Silencing of GATA6-AS diminishes TGF-β2-induced endothelial-mesenchymal transition in vitro and promotes formation of blood vessels in mice. We identify LOXL2, known to remove activating H3K4me3 chromatin marks, as a GATA6-AS-associated protein, and reveal a set of angiogenesis-related genes that are inversely regulated by LOXL2 and GATA6-AS silencing. As GATA6-AS silencing reduces H3K4me3 methylation of two of these genes, periostin and cyclooxygenase-2, we conclude that GATA6-AS acts as negative regulator of nuclear LOXL2 function. In this dataset we include the global gene expression analysis using exon arrays after silencing LOXL2. 7 samples were analyzed. Data was uploaded to and analyzed by the noncoder web interface with default parameters. Mean values of siCtl and siLOXL2 replicates were build and used for fold change siLOXL2 vs. siCtl calculation.