Defective chromatin structure in somatic cell cloned mouse embryos.

Epigenetic reprogramming plays a central role in the development of cloned embryos generated by somatic cell nuclear transfer, and it is believed that aberrant reprogramming leads to the abnormal development of most cloned embryos. Recent studies show that trimethylation of H3K27 (H3K27me3) contributes to the maintenance of embryonic stem cell pluripotency because the differentiation genes are always occupied by nucleosomes trimethylated at H3K27, which represses gene expression. Here, we provide evidence that differential H3K27me3 modification exists between normal fertilization-produced blastocysts and somatic cell nuclear transfer cloned blastocysts; H3K27me3 was specifically found in cells of the inner cell mass (ICM) of normal blastocysts, whereas there was no modification of H3K27me3 in the ICM of cloned blastocysts. Subsequently, we demonstrated that the differentiation-related genes, which are marked by H3K27me3 in embryonic stem cells, were expressed at significantly higher levels in cloned embryos than in normal embryos. The polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) component genes (Eed, Ezh2, and Suz12), which are responsible for the generation of H3K27me3, were expressed at lower levels in the cloned embryos. Our results suggest that reduced expression of PRC2 component genes in cloned embryos results in defective modification of H3K27me3 to the differentiation-related genes in pluripotent ICM cells. This results in premature expression of developmental genes and death of somatic cloned embryos shortly after implantation. Taken together, these studies suggest that H3K27me3 might be an important epigenetic marker with which to evaluate the developmental potential of cloned embryos.