bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.11.25.397935; this version posted November 27, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 The pluripotent stem cell-specific transcript ESRG is dispensable for human pluripotency 2 3 Kazutoshi Takahashi1, 2, *, Michiko Nakamura1, Megumi Narita1, Akira Watanabe3, Mai Ueda1, Yasuhiro 4 Takashima1, Shinya Yamanaka1, 2, 4 5 6 1Department of Life Science Frontiers, Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, Kyoto University, 7 Kyoto, Japan 8 2Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco, California, United States of America 9 3Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan 10 4Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States 11 of America 12 13 *Corresponding Author 14 E-mail:
[email protected] 15 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.11.25.397935; this version posted November 27, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 16 Abstract 17 Human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) express human endogenous retrovirus type-H (HERV-H), which 18 exists as more than a thousand copies on the human genome and frequently produces chimeric 19 transcripts as long-non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) fused with downstream neighbor genes.