Fig. 7: Fate determinants activate tissue-specific miRNAs.

A Comparison of the frequency with which each TF (dot, n = 143) binds at the promoters of all protein-coding genes to that at the promoters of specific gene classes (Y-axis). The dashed diagonal indicates equality of X and Y. Statistics: Wilcoxon rank sum test, two-tailed. B Tissue fate determinants (box) frequently bind at (line) the promoters of tissue-specific miRNAs (oval) that are active in the same tissue (indicated by color). Two colors are assigned to ELT-1 because it is reported to function in specifying both skin and neuron fate^31,93. C Changes in the expression of tissue-specific miRNAs after perturbing fate determinants for which ChIP-seq peaks were detected in the miRNA promoter. In each figure, the left shows the cell lineage expression of a miRNA reporter up to the 350-cell embryonic stage, before (top) and after (bottom) perturbing a fate determinant at 20 °C. Micrographs show the fluorescence intensity of miRNA reporters in bean-stage embryos. Magenta highlights the lineage and embryonic location of a pair of cells. D Changes in the expression of tissue-specific miRNAs after removing the regions bound by the indicated fate determinants from miRNA promoters. Figure organization is as in (C). In (C) and (D), results from one representative embryo are shown. Two embryos were analyzed, yielding similar results.