Transposable elements regulate T cell maturation and education in the thymus

Antigen presentation by cortical and medullary thymic epithelial cells (cTEC and mTEC) ensures the formation of a self-restricted and self-tolerant T cell repertoire, respectively. As such, a broad diversity of self-antigens needs to be presented by mTEC to induce T cell\u2019s self-tolerance. Even though the expression and antigen presentation of protein coding genes in mTEC has been abundantly described, little is known of the implication of allegedly noncoding regions of the genome to tolerance induction. In this study, we focused on transposable elements (TE), which have been shown to be highly expressed by mTEC. Overall design: Transcriptomic data from murine cTEC and mTEC were used to build personnalized databases for the identification of MHC I-associated peptides in mass spectrometry