Published in

American Association of Immunologists, The Journal of Immunology, 9(173), p. 5434-5444, 2004

DOI: 10.4049/jimmunol.173.9.5434

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The Regulated Expression of a Diverse Set of Genes during Thymocyte Positive Selection In Vivo

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Abstract A signal initiated by the newly formed Ag receptor is integrated with microenvironmental cues during T cell development to ensure positive selection of CD4+CD8+ progenitors into functionally mature CD4+ or CD8+ T lymphocytes. During this transition, a survival program is initiated, TCR gene recombination ceases, cells migrate into a new thymic microenvironment, the responsiveness of the Ag receptor is tuned, and the cells commit to a specific T lineage. To determine potential regulators of these processes, we used mRNA microarray analysis to compare gene expression changes in CD4+CD8+ thymocytes from TCR transgenic mice that have received a TCR selection signal with those that had not received a signal. We found 129 genes with expression that changed significantly during positive selection, the majority of which were not previously appreciated. A large number of these changes were confirmed by real-time PCR or flow cytometry. We have combined our findings with gene changes reported in the literature to provide a comprehensive report of the genes regulated during positive selection, and we attempted to assign these genes to positive selection process categories.