Notch1 Induces Differential Epigenomic Patterning And Genomic Organization In Fetal Liver- And Adult Bone Marrow-Derived Hematopoietic Progentiors

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is a malignancy of immature T-cell progenitors, characterized by activating NOTCH1 mutations over 50% of children and adult cases. Although intensive multiagent chemotherapy achieves cure most pediatric patients, the majority of adults succumb quickly to their disease. The basis for this divergence is likely multifactorial, but we sought this study to investigate whether cell intrinsic features might contribute to the disparate biologies pediatric and adult patients. In our prior abstract, we modeled pediatric and adult leukemias by transduction of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPC) derived from mouse fetal liver (FL) and adult bone marrow (ABM) with activated NOTCH1 virus followed by transplantation into histocompatible recipient animals. We observed that whereas FL- and ABM-derived HSPC generate similar primary acute T-cell leukemias terms of penetrance, latency, disease burden/distribution, and immunophenotype, FL leukemias exhibit much greater cycling activity than ABM leukemias, yet are dramatically impaired their ability to propagate disease secondary and tertiary recipients compared to ABM leukemias. Using a combination of gene expression profiling and vitro culture assays, we attributed this differential behavior to NOTCH1-induced autocrine IGF signaling that is operative FL, but not ABM-derived HSPC. Here we report that NOTCH1 mediates its effects on IGF1 FL-derived HSPC directly by physical occupancy over the IGF1 promoter a dimerization-dependent fashion. As well, increased NOTCH1 occupancy at the IGF1 promoter region FL tissues is associated with reduced histone H3K27 trimethylation (a mark of transcriptionally silent chromatin), yet there is equivalent histone H3K4 trimethylation (a mark identifying transcriptionally active promoters) both FL and ABM tissues, suggesting that NOTCH1 may be responsible for interconverting the IGF1 locus between active and inactive, but poised chromatin states. NOTCH1 occupancy is also associated with enhanced physical interactions between the IGF1 promoter region and distant genomic loci as revealed by circularized chromosome conformation capture (4C) assay and confirmed by chromosome conformation capture (3C) assay, including sites with H3K4 monomethylation (a mark of transcriptional enhancers) suggesting that NOTCH1 promotes looping in of distant enhancer elements that drive IGF1 expression FL tissues. We conclude from these studies that NOTCH1 enacts differential, developmental stage-specific transcriptional programs by a combination of local epigenetic patterning and long-range genomic interactions. These findings support the notion that pediatric and adult T-ALL may potentially be regarded as related, but biologically distinct diseases, and that novel, age-specific therapies that exploit these differences may improve clinical outcomes. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.