Gene expression in unfertilized eggs and the MBT stage of zebrafish embryos

Very little is known on the nature of epigenetic states in developing zebrafish despite its growing importance as a model organism in developmental biology. We report histone modifications on promoters of pluripotency genes in zebrafish embryos at the mid-late blastula transition (MBT+) stage. We identify three classes of expressed genes based on these profiles: (1) those with a promoter occupied by marks of active genes without any repressive marks; (2) those co-occupied by both activating and repressive modifications; of these genes, klf4 was notably found to be mosaically expressed in the embryo, possibly accounting for this epigenetic pattern; (3) those occupied by repressive marks with, surprisingly, little not acetylated H3K9 or H4. Culture of embryo-derived cells results in a switch from histone acetylation to K9 and K27 trimethylation on genes transcriptionally inactivated, resulting in a profile similar to that of fibroblasts. All promoters retain H3K4me3, indicating no correlation between H3K4me3 occupancy and gene expression. Our results illustrate a complex chromatin state on the promoter of pluripotency-associated genes in the zebrafish embryo, shortly after the embryonic genome is turned on. We assessed gene expression in unfertilized eggs and the MBT stage of zebrafish embryos (~ 3.5 hpf) using a 44K custom designed chip from Agilent (3 and 4 replicates, respectively). Genes of interest were extracted and evaluated according to expression dynamics and levels.