Programmed necrosis is a form of caspase-independent cell death whose molecular regulation is poorly understood. The protein kinase RIP1 is crucial for programmed necrosis. Because RIP1 also mediates activation of the pro-survival transcription factor NF-κB, we postulated that additional molecules are required to specifically activate programmed necrosis. Using a RNA interference screen, we identified RIP3 as a crucial activator for programmed necrosis induced by TNF and during virus infection. RIP3 regulates necrosis-specific RIP1 phosphorylation. The phosphorylation of RIP1 and RIP3 stabilizes their association within the pro-necrotic complex, activates the pro-necrotic kinase activity, and triggers downstream reactive oxygen species production. The pro-necrotic RIP1-RIP3 complex is induced during vaccinia virus infection. Consequently, RIP3−/− mice exhibited severely impaired virus-induced tissue necrosis, inflammation, and control of viral replication. Thus, RIP3 controls programmed necrosis by initiating the pro-necrotic kinase cascade that is essential for the innate inflammatory response against virus infections.

Understanding of mammalian enhancer function is limited by the lack of a technology to rapidly and thoroughly test their cell type-specific function. Here, we use a nuclease-deficient (d)Cas9 histone demethylase fusion to functionally characterize previously described and novel enhancer elements for their roles in the embryonic stem cell state. Further, we distinguish the mechanism of action of dCas9-LSD1 at enhancers from previous dCas9-effectors.

The identification of the trans-acting factors and cis-regulatory modules that are involved in human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) maintenance and differentiation is necessary to dissect the operating regulatory networks in these processes and thereby identify nodes where signal input will direct desired cell fate decisions in vitro or in vivo. To deconvolute these networks, we established a method to influence the differentiation state of hPSCs with a CRISPRassociated catalytically inactive dCas9 fused to an effector domain. In human embryonic stem cells, we find that the dCas9 effectors can exert positive or negative regulation on the expression of developmentally relevant genes, which can influence cell differentiation status when impinging on a key node in the regulatory network that governs the cell state. This system provides a platform for the interrogation of the underlying regulators governing specific differentiation decisions, which can then be employed to direct cellular differentiation down desired pathways.

Thymus development is critical to the adaptive immune system, yet a comprehensive transcriptional framework capturing thymus organogenesis at single-cell resolution is still needed. We applied single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to capture 8 days of thymus development, perturbations of T cell receptor rearrangement, and in vitro organ cultures, producing profiles of 24,279 cells. We resolved transcriptional heterogeneity of developing lymphocytes, and genetic perturbation confirmed T cell identity of conventional and non-conventional lymphocytes. We characterized maturation dynamics of thymic epithelial cells in vivo, classified cell maturation state in a thymic organ culture, and revealed the intrinsic capacity of thymic epithelium to preserve transcriptional regularity despite exposure to exogenous retinoic acid. Finally, by integrating the cell atlas with human genome-wide association study (GWAS) data and autoimmune-disease-related genes, we implicated embryonic thymus-resident cells as possible participants in autoimmune disease etiologies. This resource provides a single-cell transcriptional framework for biological discovery and molecular analysis of thymus organogenesis.

Chromosome conformation capture (3C) assays are used to map chromatin interactions genome-wide. Chromatin interaction maps provide insights into the spatial organization of chromosomes and the mechanisms by which they fold. Hi-C and Micro-C are widely used 3C protocols that differ in key experimental parameters including cross-linking chemistry and chromatin fragmentation strategy. To understand how the choice of experimental protocol determines the ability to detect and quantify aspects of chromosome folding we have performed a systematic evaluation of 3C experimental parameters. We identified optimal protocol variants for either loop or compartment detection, optimizing fragment size and cross-linking chemistry. We used this knowledge to develop a greatly improved Hi-C protocol (Hi-C 3.0) that can detect both loops and compartments relatively effectively. In addition to providing benchmarked protocols, this work produced ultra-deep chromatin interaction maps using Micro-C, conventional Hi-C and Hi-C 3.0 for key cell lines used by the 4D Nucleome project.