PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Merve Deniz Abdusselamoglu AU - Lisa Landskron AU - Sarah K. Bowman AU - Elif Eroglu AU - Thomas Burkard AU - Robert E. Kingston AU - Juergen A. Knoblich TI - Dynamics of activating and repressive histone modifications in <em>Drosophila</em> neural stem cell lineages and brain tumors AID - 10.1101/724039 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 724039 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/03/724039.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/03/724039.full AB - During central nervous system (CNS) development, spatiotemporal gene expression programs mediate specific lineage decisions to generate neuronal and glial cell types from neural stem cells (NSCs). However, little is known about the epigenetic landscape underlying these highly complex developmental events. Here, we perform ChIP-seq on distinct subtypes of Drosophila FACS-purified neural stem cells (NSCs) and their differentiated progeny to dissect the epigenetic changes accompanying the major lineage decisions in vivo. By analyzing active and repressive histone modifications, we show that stem cell identity genes are silenced during differentiation by loss of their activating marks and not via repressive histone modifications. Our analysis also uncovers a new set of genes specifically required for altering lineage patterns in type II neuroblasts, one of the two main Drosophila NSC identities. Finally, we demonstrate that this subtype specification in NBs, unlike NSC differentiation, requires Polycomb-group (PcG)-mediated repression.Summary statement Dynamic epigenetic landscape of Drosophila neural stem cell lineages.