Transcriptional profiling of SNAI2 regulated genes in primary human keratinocytes

Epithelial to mesenchymal transition transcription factors (EMT-TFs) such as SNAI2 have been found to be expressed endogenously in epidermal stem and progenitor cells and downregulated upon differentiation. The presence of SNAI2 in progenitor cells is necessary to repress the expression of differentiation genes by binding directly to their promoters. SNAI2 is downregulated upon differentiation which allows expression of differentiation genes. Furthermore overexpression of SNAI2 can block the differentiation process suggesting that the levels of SNAI2 are crucial to epidermal cell fate decisions. To address on a genome wide level the genes that are impacted by changing the levels of SNAI2, we performed microarray analysis on SNAI2 knockdown and overexpressing epidermal progenitor cells. Here we provide detailed methods and analysis on these microarray data which has been deposited in Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO): GSE55269. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.