Histone Deacetylase 3 is required for efficient T cell development. Mus musculus

Hdac3 is an important target of HDAC inhibitors used in the treatment of cutaneous T cell lymphoma. In order to gain an understanding of Hdac3 function in T cells,we deleted Hdac3 from early mouse thymocytes using LCK-Cre. Hdac3 deletion resulted in a loss of single positive thymocytes due to a defect in positive selection at the double positive (DP) stage of thymocyte development. To better characterize this defect, we sorted the DP1 and DP2 populations to for gene expression profiling. Overall design: Total RNA was extracted from DP1 (GFP+CD4+CD8+CD5loTCRblo) or DP2 (GFP+CD4+CD8+CD5hiTCRbint) thymocytes isolated by FACS from Hdac3+/+ or Hdac3F/F LCK-Cre+ animals. Libraries were constructed from rRNA-depleted total RNA pools to identify altered gene expression in DP populations following Hdac3 deletion.