Independent and Epigenetic Regulation of the Interleukin-4 Alleles in CD4+ T Cells
Mark Bix,
Richard M. Locksley
*
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.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed at UCSF, Box 0654, C-443,
521 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94143-0654, USA. E-mail:
locksley{at}medicine.ucsf.edu
