PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Eric M. Erkenbrack
AU  - Jamie D. Maziarz
AU  - Oliver W. Griffith
AU  - Cong Liang
AU  - Arun R. Chavan
AU  - Günter P. Wagner
TI  - The mammalian decidual cell evolved from a cellular stress response
AID  - 10.1101/246397
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 246397
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/15/246397.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/15/246397.full
AB  - Among animal species, cell types vary greatly in terms of number and kind. The broad range of number of cell types among species suggests that cell type origination is a significant source of evolutionary novelty. The molecular mechanisms giving rise to novel cell types, however, are poorly understood. Here we show that a novel cell type of eutherian mammals, the decidual stromal cell (DSC), evolved by rewiring an ancestral cellular stress response. We isolated the precursor cell type of DSCs, endometrial stromal fibroblasts (ESFs), from the opossum Monodelphis domestica. We show that, in opossum ESF, the majority of decidual core regulatory genes respond to decidualizing signals, but do not regulate decidual effector genes. Rather, in opossum ESF, decidual transcription factors function in apoptotic and oxidative stress response. We propose that the rewiring of cellular stress responses could be a general mechanism for the evolution of novel cell types.