TY - JOUR T1 - LncRNA <em>Spehd</em> regulates hematopoietic stem cells and progenitors and is required for multilineage differentiation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/340034 SP - 340034 AU - M Joaquina Delás AU - Benjamin T Jackson AU - Tatjana Kovacevic AU - Silvia Vangelisti AU - Ester Munera Maravilla AU - Sophia A Wild AU - Eva Maria Stork AU - Nicolas Erard AU - Simon RV Knott AU - Gregory J Hannon Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/14/340034.abstract N2 - Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) show patterns of tissue- and cell-type-specific expression that are very similar to those of protein coding genes and consequently have the potential to control stem and progenitor cell fate decisions along a differentiation trajectory. To understand the roles that lncRNAs might play in hematopoiesis, we selected a subset of mouse lncRNAs with potentially relevant expression patterns and refined our candidate list using evidence of conserved expression in human blood lineages. For each candidate, we assessed its possible role in hematopoietic differentiation in vivo using competitive transplantation. Our studies identified two lncRNAs that were required for hematopoiesis. One of these, Spehd, showed defective multi-lineage differentiation, and its silencing yielded common myeloid progenitors deficient in their oxidative phosphorylation pathway. This effort not only suggests that lncRNAs can contribute to differentiation decisions during hematopoiesis but also provides a path toward the identification of functional lncRNAs in other differentiation hierarchies. ER -