RESEARCH ARTICLE Aire-dependent genes undergo Clp1- mediated 3’UTR shortening associated with higher transcript stability in the thymus Clotilde Guyon1†, Nada Jmari1†, Francine Padonou1,2, Yen-Chin Li1, Olga Ucar3, Noriyuki Fujikado4‡, Fanny Coulpier5, Christophe Blanchet6, David E Root7, Matthieu Giraud1,2* 1Institut Cochin, INSERM U1016, Universite´ Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cite´, Paris, France; 2Universite´ de Nantes, Inserm, Centre de Recherche en Transplantation et Immunologie, UMR 1064, ITUN, F-44000, Nantes, France; 3Division of Developmental Immunology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; 4Division of Immunology, Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States; 5Ecole Normale Supe´rieure, PSL Research University, CNRS, INSERM, Institut de Biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supe´rieure (IBENS), Plateforme Ge´nomique, Paris, France; 6Institut Franc¸ais de Bioinformatique, IFB-Core, CNRS UMS 3601, Evry, France; 7The Broad *For correspondence: Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, United States
[email protected] †These authors contributed equally to this work Present address: ‡Lilly Abstract The ability of the immune system to avoid autoimmune disease relies on tolerization of Biotechnology Center, Lilly thymocytes to self-antigens whose expression and presentation by thymic medullary epithelial cells Research Laboratories, Eli Lilly (mTECs) is controlled predominantly by Aire at the transcriptional level and possibly regulated at and Company, San Diego, other unrecognized levels. Aire-sensitive gene expression is influenced by several molecular factors, United States some of which belong to the 3’end processing complex, suggesting they might impact transcript Competing interests: The stability and levels through an effect on 3’UTR shortening. We discovered that Aire-sensitive genes authors declare that no display a pronounced preference for short-3’UTR transcript isoforms in mTECs, a feature preceding competing interests exist.