Expression data of Sirt1-deficient and sufficient medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs). Mus musculus

Medullary thymic epithelial cells play essential role for induction of central self-tolerance. This functional capacity is mediated through a phenomenon known as promiscuous gene expression (pGE) of various tissue-restricted antigen (TRA) genes. pGE was previously shown to be mediated by a single factor called the Autoimmune regulator (Aire), which is specically expressed by mTECs. The aim of this study was to analyze the impact of deacetylase Sirtuin1, which is also highly expressed by mTECs, on mTEC gene expression profile and compare it with the impact of Aire. We used Affymetrix mouse 1ST arrays to analyze the impact of the Sirt1 gene on the gene expression profile of MHC-II high medullary thymic epithelial cells Overall design: Mature MHC-II high mTECs were flow-sorted from thymi isolated from B6.Sirt1fl/fl, B6.Sirt1fl/flFoxn1-Cre and B6.Aire–/– 6weeks old mice. Typically, 3 mice were pooled to obtain 30-60 thousand sorted mTECs, which were then analyzed by gene expression profiling. Specifically, total RNA was extracted from ~30,000 pooled sorted cells using Trizol. Purified total RNA was then amplified using the MessageAmp RNA kit (Ambion). Biotinylated cRNA was then hybridized to Affymetrix Mouse Gene 1-ST arrays by the genomics core at the Weizmann Institute