Independent and epigenetic regulation of the interleukin-4 alleles in CD4+ T cells.
How an individual effector T cell acquires a particular cytokine expression pattern from many possible patterns remains unclear. CD4+ T cells from F1 mice, which allowed assignment of the parental origin of interleukin-4 (IL-4) transcripts, were divided into clones that expressed IL-4 biallelically or monoallelically from either allele. The allelic pattern was transmitted as a stable epigenetic trait. Regulation of cytokine expression by a mechanism that treats each allele independently suggests a probabilistic process by which a diverse repertoire of combinatorially assorted cytokine gene expression patterns could be generated among the clonally related daughters of a single precursor cell.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Departments of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco, CA 94143-0654, USA.
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D000483:Alleles; D000818:Animals; D015496:CD4-Positive T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology*; D003433:Crosses, Genetic; D016207:Cytokines / Q000235:genetics; D018076:DNA, Complementary; D005260:Female; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D015847:Interleukin-4 / Q000235:genetics*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008807:Mice, Inbred BALB C; D008815:Mice, Inbred Strains; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction
D016207:Cytokines; D018076:DNA, Complementary; D015847:Interleukin-4