Changes of epigenetic status affect the oligodendrocyte development. In the field of oligodendrocyte, several epigenetic factors were reported to be essential for myelination. These include DNA methylation modifiers41, RNA modifiers42,43, chromatin remodelers7,44,45, histone acetylation enzymes46 and histone methylation enzymes24,47,48. Most of these modifiers or enzymes are well-studied in the context of OPC differentiation, while H3K9me3 modifier SETDB1 remains not. Casaccia and colleagues did a study on the impact of H3K9me3 modification on OPC development in vitro24. We noticed that their conclusions are contradictory to ours, which might be attributed to differences in the methods to deliver shRNA. In their study, lentivirus was used to delivery shRNA. However, we used electroporation. Moreover, they did not investigate SETDB1, the leading actor in our study, in OPC development. And we showed that SETDB1, a key H3K9me3 modifier, promote OPC differentiation by repressing inhibitory effector Sox11.
