Abnormal chromatin remodeling caused by ARID1A deletion leads to malformation of the dentate gyrus

ARID1A, an SWI/SNF chromatin-remodeling gene, is commonly mutated in cancer and hypothesized to be a tumor suppressor. Recently, loss-of-function of ARID1A gene has been shown to cause intellectual disability. Here we generate Arid1a conditional knockout mice and investigate Arid1a function in the hippocampus. Disruption of Arid1a in mouse forebrain significantly decreases neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs) proliferation and differentiation to neurons within the dentate gyrus (DG), increasing perinatal and postnatal apoptosis, leading to reduced hippocampus size. Moreover, we perform single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to investigate cellular heterogeneity and reveal that Arid1a is necessary for the maintenance of the DG progenitor pool and survival of post-mitotic neurons. Transcriptome and ChIP-seq analysis data demonstrate that ARID1A specifically regulates Prox1 by altering the levels of histone modifications. Overexpression of downstream target Prox1 can rescue proliferation and differentiation defects of NSPCs caused by Arid1a deletion. Overall, our results demonstrate a critical role for Arid1a in the development of the hippocampus and may also provide insight into the genetic basis of intellectual disabilities such as Coffin–Siris syndrome, which is caused by germ-line mutations or microduplication of Arid1a .