Transcriptome-wide m6A methylome during osteogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem cells

Objectives Adipose-derived stem cells are frequently used for bone regeneration both in vitro and in vivo. N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is the most abundant post-transcriptional modification on eukaryotic RNAs and plays multifaceted roles in development and diseases. However, the regulatory mechanisms of m6A in osteogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem cells (hASCs) remain elusive. The present study aimed to build the transcriptome-wide m6A methylome during the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. Materials and methods hASCs were harvested after being cultured in a basic or osteogenic medium for 7 days, and the osteogenic differentiation was validated by alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and Alizarin Red S staining, ALP activity assay, and qRT-PCR analysis of ALP, RUNX2, BGLAP, SPP1, SP7, and COL1A1 genes. The m6A level was colorimetrically measured, and the expression of m6A regulators was confirmed by qRT-PCR and western blot. Moreover, m6A MeRIP-seq and RNA-seq were performed to build the transcriptome and m6A methylome. Furthermore, bioinformatic analyses including volcano plots, Venn plots, clustering analysis, Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway, gene sets enrichment analysis, and protein-protein interaction analysis were conducted. Results In total, 1145 differentially methylated peaks, 2261 differentially expressed genes, and 671 differentially methylated and expressed genes (DMEGs) were identified. GO and KEGG pathway analyses conducted for these DMEGs revealed extensive and osteogenic biological functions. The “PI3K-Akt signaling pathway”; “MAPK signaling pathway”; “parathyroid hormone synthesis, secretion, and action”; and “p53 signaling pathway” were significantly enriched, and the DMEGs in these pathways were identified as m6A-specific key genes. A protein-protein interaction network based on DMEGs was built, and VEGFA, CD44, MMP2, HGF, and SPARC were speculated as the hub DMEGs. Conclusions The total m6A level was reduced with osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. The transcriptome-wide m6A methylome built in the present study indicated quite a few signaling pathways, and hub genes were influenced by m6A modification. Future studies based on these epigenetic clues could promote understanding of the mechanisms of osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13287-021-02508-1.


Introduction
Large bone defects, caused by trauma, bone loss, and tumors, lead to heavy social and economic burdens. At present, the clinical gold standard for the treatment of skeletal defects is autogenous or allogeneic bone grafts, which suffers disadvantages of a limited amount of harvested bone and donor site morbidity [1,2]. Bone tissue engineering, built on stem cells or osteoprogenitor cells, osteoconductive biomaterials, and osteoconductive cytokines facilitating cellular proliferation and osteogenic differentiation, offers a promising solution [2,3]. Human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hBMSCs), naturally resident in the bone marrow, are pluripotent and have been widely applied in bone tissue engineering for years [4,5]. However, the access to autogenous hBMSCs is invasive and subject to limited cell incidence. What is more, the self-renewal and proliferative ability of hBMSCs weakens with donor aging and diseases such as osteoporosis and arthritis [6][7][8].
Adipose stromal cells, available from lipoaspirate, are a cellular niche containing differentiated cells, committed progenitors, and mesenchymal stem cells [9]. Among the multiple cell types, adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) are pluripotent, with adipogenic, chondrogenic, neurogenic, and osteogenic potentials. In the presence of ascorbate, glycerophosphate, and dexamethasone, ADSCs can differentiate into osteoblast-like cells [10][11][12]. Meanwhile, ADSCs have high proliferation rates and immunosuppressive properties and can secrete numerous polypeptides, hormones, and effective growth factors to induce osteogenesis. Moreover, ADSCs can also secrete a mass of suitable chemokines to recruit endogenous stem cells into the bone defect site [12][13][14]. With the increasing incidence of obesity worldwide, subcutaneous adipose tissue is easy to obtain, making human adipose-derived stem cells (hASCs) a first-rate alternative for hBMSCs in bone regenerative medicine [11].
In the present study, we aimed to investigate the roles of m 6 A in the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. Highthroughput sequencing for RNA (RNA-seq) and methylated RNA immunoprecipitation and sequencing (m 6 A MeRIP-Seq) were performed to comprehensively identify differentially regulated m 6 A peaks and messenger RNAs between two groups: undifferentiated hASCs (uhASCs) and osteogenically differentiated hASCs (dhASCs). The expressions of osteogenic markers, m 6 A regulating genes, and hub genes were validated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analyses were performed for the differentially methylated genes (DMGs), differentially expressed genes (DEGs), and differentially methylated and expressed genes (DMEGs) to reveal the biological significance of m 6 A in osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. Moreover, we also built the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network based on the DMEGs and calculated the hub genes in this process. These findings could provide a new perspective on the molecular mechanisms of osteogenic differentiation in hASCs.

Cell culture
The primary hASCs from healthy adult donors in this study were obtained from Cyagen Biosciences (Suzhou, China). The cells were cultured with OriCell™ Human ASC Growth Medium (Cyagen) containing 10% fetal bovine serum, 1% penicillin-streptomycin, and 1% glutamine. The medium was renewed every 3 days until the cells were passaged upon approximately 80% confluence. All the cells were cultured in an incubator with 5% CO 2 at 37°C. As our preliminary study indicated, the hASCs expressed a high level of stem cell surface markers CD29, CD44, CD105, and HLA-ABC, while less than 5% expressed CD31, CD34, CD45, and HLA-DR [32]. The third to the seventh generation of hASCs were used for osteogenic differentiation.

ALP and ARS staining
ALP staining was conducted after 10 days of induction of osteogenic differentiation. Cells were fixed with 4% polyoxymethylene for 15 min and incubated with 0.1 M Tris buffer (pH 9.3) containing 0.25% naphthol AS-BI phosphate (Sigma) and 0.75% Fast Blue BB (Sigma) at 37°C for 45 min. The Alkaline Phosphatase Assay Kit (Beyotime, China) was adopted according to the manufacturer's instruction, and the ALP activity was quantified by a spectrophotometer (Thermo Fisher Scientific) at 405 nm.
ARS staining was conducted after 14 days of induction of osteogenic differentiation. Cells were fixed with 4% polyoxymethylene for 15 min and stained with 1% Alizarin Red S (ARS) Stain Solution (Cyagen) at room temperature for 5 min. And then, the solution was removed, and the samples were rinsed 3-4 times with deionized water. Alizarin Red-positive area was analyzed using the ImageJ software (NIH) and shown as a percentage of Alizarin Red-positive area over the total area.

Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis
The expressions of osteogenic markers, m 6 A regulating genes, and hub DMEGs were validated by qRT-PCR. Total RNA from hASCs was extracted using TRIzol Reagent (Invitrogen) according to the manufacturer's instructions. The RNA purity and concentration were measured with a NanoDrop 2000 (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Reverse transcription was performed by Prime-Script™ RT Reagent Kit with gDNA Eraser (Takara, Japan). qRT-PCR reaction was performed using TB Green™ Premix Ex Taq™ II (Takara) in QuantStudio 3 Real-Time PCR Systems (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Relative gene expression was normalized by GAPDH using a 2−ΔΔCt method. The primers used in this study are listed in Supplementary Table S1.

Western blot
Cells after 7 days of osteogenic induction were lysed in RIPA buffer (Beyotime, China) on ice. The samples were heated at 95°C for 5 min in a sample buffer containing 20% SDS-PAGE sample loading buffer, separated on 10% SDS-polyacrylamide gels, and transferred to the PVDF membranes by a wet transfer apparatus (Bio-Rad). The membranes were blocked with 5% BSA for 1 h and then incubated overnight with rabbit METTL3 polyclonal antibody   The m 6 A MeRIP-Seq and RNA-Seq were performed after 7 days of induced osteogenic differentiation. Total RNA was extracted using TRIzol Reagent (Invitrogen, CA, USA) and was tested for quality and quantity with Bioanalyzer 2100 and RNA 6000 Nano LabChip Kit (Agilent, CA, USA) with RIN number > 7.0. Then, poly-T oligo-attached magnetic beads (Invitrogen) were used to isolate poly(A) mRNA from the total RNA. Next, the poly(A) mRNA fractions are fragmented into~100-ntlong oligonucleotides and then incubated for 2 h at 4°C with m 6 A-specific antibody (No. 202003, Synaptic Systems, Germany) in IP buffer (50 mM Tris-HCl, 750 mM NaCl and 0.5% Igepal CA-630) supplemented with BSA (0.5 μg μl −1 ). The mixture was then incubated with protein-A beads and eluted with elution buffer (1 × IP buffer and 6.7 mM m 6 A). Eluted RNA was precipitated by 75% ethanol. Both eluted m 6 A-containing fragments (IP) and untreated control fragments (input) are converted to the final cDNA library. The average insert size for the paired-end libraries was~100 ± 50 bp. And then the paired-end 2 × 150 bp sequencing was performed on an Illumina Novaseq™ 6000 platform at the LC-BIO Bio-Tech Ltd. (Hangzhou, China) following the vendor's recommended protocol.

Data analysis
First, we used Cutadapt and perl scripts inhouse to remove the reads containing adaptor contamination, lowquality bases, and undetermined bases. Then, sequence quality was validated by fastp. Next, HISAT2 was used to map reads to the genome of Homo sapiens (version: v96). The R package exomePeak was adopted to process mapped reads of IP and input libraries and identifies m 6 A peaks with bed or bam format that can be adapted for visualization on the IGV software (http://www.igv. org/). HOMER and MEME were used for de novo and known motif finding followed by localization of the motif with respect to peak summit by perl. Called peaks were annotated by intersection with gene architecture using ChIPseeker. Then, StringTie was used to perform the expression level for all mRNAs from input libraries by calculating FPKM. The differentially expressed mRNAs were selected with the standard of p-value < 0.05 and log2 (fold change) > 1 or < −1 and by the R package edgeR.

Venn analysis
Venn analysis was performed to characterize overlapped dysregulated m 6 A peaks and mRNAs between dhASCs and uhASCs detected by MeRIP-Seq and RNA-Seq. The number of m 6 A peaks and mRNAs with or without overlapping were shown in different colors in a pie diagram. Up-and downregulated m 6 A peaks and mRNAs were analyzed separately.

GO and KEGG analyses
GO and KEGG pathway analyses were performed on m 6 A peaks and mRNAs. GO analysis, including molecular function, biologic process, and cellular component, was performed. p < 0.05 denoted the significance of GO term enrichment. Based on the KEGG database, pathway analysis was performed to analyze the potential functions. GO and pathway enrichment analyses were also performed based on the differentially regulated m 6 A peaks and mRNAs.

Gene set enrichment analysis
For gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), gene lists "c2.cp.kegg.v7.3.symbols" were obtained from MSigDB, and the analysis was performed with the GSEA software (http://www.broad.mit.edu/GSEA). In short, we imported our gene lists of interest into the software and examined the significance of the given gene sets. p-values were computed using a bootstrap distribution created by resampling gene sets of the same cardinality.

Construction of the protein-protein interaction network
The protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed to assess the interactions between the differentially methylated and expressed genes (DMEGs) based on the correlation analysis. All the DMEGs were selected to construct the network using Cytoscape 3.8 (Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle). Then, we calculated the hub genes by combining scores from all DMEGs.

Statistical analysis
Statistical tests were performed using R version 3.6.0, SPSS 24.0 (IBM, NY, USA) and GraphPad Prism 8.0. Numerical data was presented as means ± standard deviation. Differences between the two groups were evaluated for statistical significance by a t-test. The appropriate analysis of variance was used when more than two groups were evaluated, followed by Dunnett's multiple comparisons test to compare the difference between the groups. p ≤ .05 was considered statistically significant. The R packages VennDiagram, Com-plexHeatmap, clusterProfiler, and ggplot2 were used for graphing and data visualization.

Results
Osteogenic differentiation of hASCs was successfully induced.
The ALP activity, validated by ALP staining and ALP activity quantification assay, was significantly higher in the dhASCs group than in the uhASCs group. A similar result regarding mineral nodes forming was observed in ARS staining (Fig. 1a-d). Moreover, compared to the control group, the expressions of ALP, RUNX2, SPP1, SP7, and COL1A1 were significantly increased in the dhASCs group (Fig. 1e). These results confirmed the osteogenic differentiation of dhASCs. To learn about the m 6 A methylation in the process of osteogenic differentiation of hASCs, we first detected the relative m 6 A level between the groups. The m 6 A quantification assay analysis revealed a significantly reduced m 6 A level during the osteogenic induction of hASCs from day 0 to day 14, with the most significant and steepest reduction at the early stage (Fig. 2a, b). Then, we investigated the expression of m 6 A regulators. According to the RNA-seq, compared with the uhASCs group, FTO expression was significantly increased in the dhASCs group at day 7. However, the expression of METTL3, METTL14, and ALKBH5 showed no significant differences between the groups (Fig. 2c). Further, the qRT-PCR revealed the expression of METTL3 was significantly elevated at day 7 and day 14, and the expression of FTO was significantly elevated at day 7 and significantly decreased to baseline at day 14 (Fig. 2d). Moreover, the expressions of METTL3, METTL14, FTO, and ALKBH5 between the groups were confirmed by western blotting (Fig. 2e). In a word, these results demonstrated potential effects of m 6 A in the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs.  Figure S1a-b). For dhASCs, 43.85% of the peaks were detected in the 3′UTR region, 20.48% in the 5′UTR region, 11.06% in the first exon, and 24.61% in the remaining exons (Supplementary Figure S1c-d). According to the MeRIP-Seq, by the standard of p-value < 0.05 and fold change (fc) ≥ 2, 1145 m 6 A peaks were significantly dysregulated after a 7-day osteogenic induction of hASCs, of which 534 peaks were hypermethylated and 611 hypomethylated (Fig. 3a). In addition, 48.81% of the dysregulated peaks were in the 3′UTR region, 19.46% in the 5′UTR region, 9.77% in the first exon, and 21.96% in the remaining exons (Fig. 3b, c). The top 20 DMGs were listed in Table 1, and the full list of DMGs was shown in Supplementary Table S2. Furthermore, the motif analysis validated m 6 A RRACH (R was purine, A was m 6 A, and H was a non-guanine bas) consensus sequence enrichment between uhASCs and dhASCs (Fig. 3d).
The DMGs were associated with extensive and osteogenic biological functions To figure out the biological significance of m 6 A methylation in the osteogenesis of hASCs, we performed GO and KEGG pathway analyses for DMGs. GO analysis uncovered that both the hypermethylated and hypomethylated genes in dhASCs were significantly involved with "regulation of transcription, DNA-templated," "regulation of transcription by RNA polymerase II," "signal transduction," "cell differentiation," and "multicellular organism development" (ontology: biological process); "membrane," "nucleus," and "cytoplasm" (ontology: cellular component); and "protein binding," "metal ion binding," and "DNA binding" (ontology: molecular function) (Fig. 4a, c).
Remarkably, KEGG pathway analysis demonstrated that the hypermethylated genes were significantly associated with signaling pathway "thyroid hormone signaling pathway," "Rap1 signaling pathway," and "FoxO signaling pathway" (Fig. 4b). However, the hypomethylated genes were not significantly associated with the common osteogenic signaling pathway (Fig. 4d).

PPI network and hub genes were discovered among DMEGs
The PPI network of the DMEGs was conducted by STRI NG database and Cytoscape (Fig. 6a). The network was grouped into four clusters as mentioned before, that is, hyper-up, hypo-down, hyper-down, and hypo-up DMEGs (Fig. 6b-e). GO enrichment analyses were performed for each cluster of DMEGs to elucidate their biological function ( Fig. 6b-e). Hub genes in the PPI network were selected using cytoHubba by calculating the protein combining degree (Fig. 6f). And the m 6 A peak distribution of the top 5 hub genes between the groups was shown in Fig. 6g, and the expressions of the 5 hub DMEGs were shown in Fig. 6h. The PPI network interaction metadata was listed in Supplementary Table S5.

Discussion
Adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs), as one form of mesenchymal stem cells with good accessibility and special biological properties, are frequently used for bone regeneration both in vitro and in vivo [11,12]. According to the current criteria, the isolation of ADSCs produces cell type heterogeneity, and the purity of ADSCs is essential for their engineering use [9]. In the present study, the hASCs were identified with surface markers and successfully induced into osteoblast-like cells [9,32]. Identifying factors involved in the osteogenic differentiation of ASCs is important for better understanding the mechanism of osteogenic differentiation. Recent studies have shown that m 6 A modification plays essential roles in stem cell fate decisions in a stage-, state-, and cell type-specific manner [26,[36][37][38][39][40]. In the case of  [30,40,41]. As for preadipocytes, some studies reported FTO promoted adipogenesis by regulating cell cycle-related genes and the JAK2-STAT3-C/EBPb signaling pathway in an m 6 A-dependent manner in 3T3-L1 cell lines [42][43][44][45]. However, at the present stage, little is known about the roles of m 6 A modification in the osteogenic differentiation of ADSCs. In this study, using m 6 A MeRIP-Seq and RNA-seq, we depicted the transcriptome-wide m 6 A methylome in the process of osteogenic differentiation of hASCs for the first time.   In the present study, we observed that from day 0 to day 14, the level of m 6 A modification decreased continuously with the most significant and steepest reduction at the early stage. Therefore, we investigated the time point day 7 to explore potential m 6 A-related signaling pathways. Combined with significant expression changes of m 6 A regulators METTL3 and FTO, we unveiled the potential effects of m 6 A modification in osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. The changes of m 6 A level during osteogenic induction of hASCs appeared stage-specific. This was probably because of the time-dependent expression pattern of m 6 A regulators. At the early stage, the elevated expression of demethylase FTO predominantly reduced the m 6 A level. With the osteogenic induction lasting, the expression of FTO decreased while the expression of methyltransferase METTL3 maintained, resulting in a slower reduction of m 6 A level. Interestingly, this trend was contrary to that of BMSCs where a time-dependent increase of m 6 A content during osteogenic differentiation was reported [29]. In the cases of BMSCs, from day 0 to day 14, the expression of methyltransferase METTL3 increased while the expression of demethylase FTO and ALKBH5 did not change significantly [41]. The differences between hASCs and BMSCs might reflect the cell type-specific effects of m 6 A modification in stem cell differentiation [26,40]. Although both were mesenchymal stem cells, the distinct origins may cause different gene expression pattern and epigenetic modifications, thus producing divergent stemness, proliferation capacity, multilineage differentiation potential, longevity, immunoregulatory properties, and so on [6,46]. Considering the complex stage-and state-specific roles of m 6 A modification, the m 6 A methylome of a prolonged osteogenic induction of hASCs remains to be revealed.
In total, the m 6 A MeRIP-Seq revealed an abundance of 1.94 and 1.96 peaks per transcript for uhASCs and dhASCs, respectively. Additionally, the m 6 A peaks of both uhASCs and dhASCs were mostly enriched in the 3′UTR region and near the stop codon; these sites were m 6 A-specific and consistent with previous studies [15][16][17][18][19]47]. Furthermore, during the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs, the differentially methylated peaks were significantly enriched in "signal transduction," "regulation of transcription," "multicellular organism development," "cell differentiation," and so on, indicating the conservative and fundamental roles of m 6 A in regulating development and cell fate specification [16,17].
In order to elucidate the mechanism of m 6 A in affecting osteogenic differentiation of hASCs, we combined the m 6 A methylome and the transcriptome and found the key signaling pathways that were affected by m 6 A modification. As with previous studies, several canonical pathways regarding osteogenic differentiation were significantly enriched. The most significant ones were the "PI3K-Akt signaling pathways," "MAPK signaling pathways," "parathyroid hormone synthesis, secretion and action," and "P53 signaling pathways," in which quite a few key genes were differentially methylated [20,22,30,40,41,48]. Moreover, although other common osteogenic pathways were not significantly enriched in the m 6 A methylome, quite a few key genes in these pathways were significantly methylated. At the same time, we constructed the PPI network of DMEGs and speculated the hub genes based on combining degree, for example, the genes of VEGFA, CD44, MMP2, HGF, and SPARC. All these differentially expressed as well as differentially methylated key genes and hub genes provided the latest and detailed information about how m 6 A modification affected the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs. A mass of studies in the past few years have lighted up the biological effects of m 6 A modification on RNAs [19-22, 40, 47, 49-52]. On the one hand, the m 6 A methylation process is reversable, and this mark on RNA could be written or erased in case of various stimuli and biological factors [17,47,49]. On the other hand, m 6 A can affect RNA processing and metabolism in multifaceted mechanisms, including alternative splicing, alternative polyadenylation, RNA stability, RNA export, RNA degradation, and translation. Therefore, m 6 A up-or downregulates the gene expression in a complex and contextdepended manner [17][18][19]. For this reason, we observed four groups of DMEGs in the present study, those were hyper-up, hypo-down, hyper-down, and hypo-up DMEGs. Our function enrichment analyses suggested that these four clusters of DMEGs were associated with the fundamental and different biological processes. Combined with the methylation and expression pattern of the key DMEGs, future studies based on these molecular clues could give us brand-new knowledge on the osteogenic differentiation of hASCs from an m 6 A-specific epigenetic perspective.

Conclusions
Total m 6 A level was reduced with osteogenic differentiation of hASCs, and the transcriptome-wide m 6 A methylome built in the present study indicated quite a few signaling pathways and hub genes were influenced by m 6 A modification. In total, 1145 DMGs, 2261 DEGs, and 671 DMEGs were detected. GO and KEGG pathway analysis conducted for these differentially methylated and regulated genes revealed extensive and osteogenic biological functions. The "PI3K-Akt signaling pathway," "MAPK signaling pathway," "parathyroid hormone synthesis, secretion and action," and "p53 signaling pathway" were significantly enriched, and the DMEGs in these pathways were identified as m 6 A-specific key genes. PPI network based on DMEGs was built, and VEGFA, CD44, MMP2, HGF, and SPARC were speculated as the hub DMEGs. Future studies based on these epigenetic clues could promote the understanding of the mechanisms of osteogenic differentiation of hASCs.