LncRNA profiling of human lymphoid progenitors reveals transcriptional divergence of B and T lineages

To elucidate the transcriptional landscape that regulates human lymphoid commitment during postnatal life, we used RNA sequencing to assemble the long non-coding transcriptome across human bone marrow and thymic progenitors spanning the earliest stages of B and T lymphoid specification. Over 3000 novel long non-coding RNA genes (lncRNAs) were revealed through the analysis of these rare populations. Lymphoid commitment was characterized by lncRNA expression patterns that were highly stage-specific and more lineage-specific than protein coding Users may view, print, copy, and download text and data-mine the content in such documents, for the purposes of academic research, subject always to the full Conditions of use:http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/license.html#terms Correspondence should be addressed to G.M.C. (; Email: [email protected]) or C.P. (; Email: [email protected]) 8These authors contributed equally to this work Accession codes Raw sequence files (RNA-Seq) have been deposited at NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus (GSE69239). Author Contributions D. C., conception and design, developed bioinformatics analysis pipeline, bioinformatic analysis and interpretation, manuscript writing. S.S., conception and design, collection and assembly of data (performed experiments), data analysis and interpretation. C.S.S., data analysis and interpretation. J. S., conception and design. Y.Z., collection and assembly of data (assisted in performance of experiments). V.L.H. and A.L., collection and assembly of data (performed experiments). C.P., conception and design, collection and assembly of data (performed experiments), data analysis and interpretation, manuscript writing, final approval of manuscript. G.M.C., conception and design, data analysis and interpretation, manuscript writing, final approval of manuscript. COMPETING FINANCIAL INTERESTS The authors declare no competing financial interests. HHS Public Access Author manuscript Nat Immunol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 May 18. Published in final edited form as: Nat Immunol. 2015 December ; 16(12): 1282–1291. doi:10.1038/ni.3299. A uhor M anscript