Wdr5-mediated H3K4me3 coordinately regulates cell differentiation, proliferation termination, and survival in digestive organogenesis

Food digestion requires the cooperation of different digestive organs. The differentiation of digestive organs is crucial for larvae to start feeding. Therefore, during digestive organogenesis, cell identity and the tissue morphogenesis must be tightly coordinated but how this is accomplished is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that WD repeat domain 5 (Wdr5)-mediated H3K4 tri-methylation (H3K4me3) coordinately regulates cell differentiation, proliferation and apoptosis in zebrafish organogenesis of three major digestive organs including intestine, liver, and exocrine pancreas. During zebrafish digestive organogenesis, some of cells in these organ primordia usually undergo differentiation without apoptotic activity and gradually reduce their proliferation capacity. In contrast, cells in the three digestive organs of wdr5^-/- mutant embryos retain progenitor-like status with high proliferation rates, and undergo apoptosis. Wdr5 is a core member of COMPASS complex to implement H3K4me3 and its expression is enriched in digestive organs from 2 days post-fertilization (dpf). Further analysis reveals that lack of differentiation gene expression is due to significant decreases of H3K4me3 around the transcriptional start sites of these genes; this histone modification also reduces the proliferation capacity in differentiated cells by increasing the expression of apc to promote the degradation of β-Catenin; in addition, H3K4me3 promotes the expression of anti-apoptotic genes such as xiap-like, which modulates p53 activity to guarantee differentiated cell survival. Thus, our findings have discovered a common molecular mechanism for cell fate determination in different digestive organs during organogenesis, and also provided insights to understand mechanistic basis of human diseases in these digestive organs.