Screening For Proteins Interacting With FOXP3 Gene By Yeast Two Hybrid System

Background and goal:Regulatory T cell (Treg) can suppress the effective T cell, which is an important mechanism that the immune system utilizes to keep the self-homeostasis. Many signaling pathways are involved in the activation and the control of T cell responses. Treg cells are obviously important in these processes and they supress the effective T cell mainly through cell-cell contact. Altough there are no definitive markers, Treg cells are often characterized by the constitutive expression of cell surface proteins such as CD25, CTLA-4 and GITR. These proteins are also expressed on activated T cells, however, which complicates their use as markers. Absence of the transcription factor Scurfin (also known as forkhead box P3 and encoded by FOXP3) causes a rapidly fatal lymphoproliferative diease, similar to that seen in mice lacking cytolytic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4). Here we know that FOXP3 is highly expressed by Treg cells, necessary for the development of Treg, and sufficient for conventional naive T cells to acquire the phenotype and function of Treg cells. Taken together, the data indicate that FOXP3 is a crucial regulator of immune cell function. However, the role of FOXP3 in the molecular basis for Treg cell generation and its mechanism remain unclear.A gene is a region of DNA that controls a discrete hereditary characteristic, usually corresponding to a single mRNA carrying the information for constructing a protein. It contains one or more regulatory sequences that increase or decrease the rate of its transcription. In the post-genome era, identifying the functions and interactions of disease-associated proteins produced by individual genes and their roles in specific disease may provide a major opportunity to elucidate disease mechanisms, and to identify new diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets. The yeast two-hybrid system has been widely used in the identification of protein interactions. It is well established that interaction partners are an immediate lead into biological function and can potentially be exploited for therapeutic purposes. Therefore, we screened the adult liver cDNA library and acquired the...