Leukemia core transcriptional circuitry is a sparsely interconnected hierarchy stabilized by incoherent feed-forward loops.

Lien vers Pubmed [PMID] – 36993171

Lien DOI – 10.1101/2023.03.13.532438

bioRxiv 2023 Mar; ():

Lineage-defining transcription factors form densely interconnected circuits in chromatin occupancy assays, but the functional significance of these networks remains underexplored. We reconstructed the functional topology of a leukemia cell transcription network from the direct gene-regulatory programs of eight core transcriptional regulators established in pre-steady state assays coupling targeted protein degradation with nascent transcriptomics. The core regulators displayed narrow, largely non-overlapping direct transcriptional programs, forming a sparsely interconnected functional hierarchy stabilized by incoherent feed-forward loops. BET bromodomain and CDK7 inhibitors disrupted the core regulators’ direct programs, acting as mixed agonists/antagonists. The network is predictive of dynamic gene expression behaviors in time-resolved assays and clinically relevant pathway activity in patient populations.