TALEN-mediated biallelic inactivation of MYB in human embryonic stem cell lines WAe001-A-45 and WAe001-A-46.

MYB/c-MYB is a proto-oncogene encoding a helix-turn-helix transcription factor that plays a critical role in controlling proliferation and multilineage differentiation of hematopoietic progenitor and stem cells. Deregulation of MYB expression is associated with several types of leukemias and lymphomas. In an attempt to explore the role of the gene in the early human hematopoiesis, we have achieved bi-allelic targeting of MYB in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) by TALEN-mediated homologous recombination. Furthermore, the gene targeting introduced eYFP Venus reporter gene into the MYB locus to delineate the expression pattern of MYB. The resulting two cell lines, WAe001-A-45 and WAe001-A-46, passed the standard assays for human pluripotent stem cells. Hematopoietic differentiation of these cell lines provides a model to study the role of MYB in human hematopoietic development.