Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 27, 2026

Isolation and Th17 Differentiation of Naïve CD4 T Lymphocytes
Published on: September 26, 2013
Independent and epigenetic regulation of the interleukin-4 alleles in CD4+ T cells
1Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Departments of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco, CA 94143-0654, USA.
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.
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.
Related Concept Videos
Epigenetic Regulation
Master Transcription Regulators
Lineage Commitment
Epigenetic Regulation
X-chromosome...
T Cell Activation and Clonal Selection
Naive T cells that have not yet encountered an antigen express two primary CD...
T Cell Types and Functions
Th1 cells stimulate dendritic cells to express necessary co-stimulatory molecules on their surfaces for...

