Transcriptome-wide response to synthetic chromatin protein PcTF: Breast Cancer

The goal of this study was to identify genes that become upregulated in response to a synthetic transcription factor, PcTF, in a panel of breast cancer model cell lines. PcTF contains a conserved H3K27me3-binding chromodomain expressed in-frame with an mCherry fluorescent tag and a VP64 activation domain. Therefore, we expected genes with H3K27me3-associated promoters to become upregulated upon PcTF expression. We observed that hundreds of genes became up or downregulated. Overall design: MCF7, BT474, or BT549 cells were transfected with a plasmid that constitutively expressed the PcTF protein. 24, 48, and 72 hrs post-transfection, total mRNA was extracted from treated and untreated cells, as well as from untransfected MCF10A cells.