O papel modulador do gene AIRE - capes

MANUSCRITOpurified from ex vivo mouse thymic tissue at embryonic day 15 (E15) (Derbinskiet al., 2001).In view of that, the complexity of PGE increases in, from cTECs to immaturemTECs to mature CD80 hi mTECs. As the PGE is a phenomenon associated toautoantigen representation, the different gene pools are not complementary, butadditive, that is, there is no apparent association between themolecular/biological functions of the genes representing parenchymal organsand tissues. The significance of PGE in the thymus is related with the centraltolerance to self antigens (Kyewski and Derbinski, 2004; Sospedra et al., 1998;Bruno et al., 2002; Bruno et al., 2004; Derbinski et al., 2005; Gallegos et al.,2006).In a recent study made by our group and using RT-PCR, we observed that theAire gene start its expression in embryonic mouse thymus at E16 stage and bycDNA microarray method, it was observed that PGE emerges as highthroughput gene expression at E20 stage (Sousa Cardoso et al., 2006).PGE is today a well documented phenomenon, but several of their aspectsare still unexplored, as for example, its evaluation in the thymus of autoimmuneand/or knockout mouse strains, its modulation by means of cytokines or othermolecules interfering in the gene expression, such as RNA interference.In the present study, we used a purified CD80 + mature mTEC cell line growingin vitro to further explore the role of the Aire gene in the control of PGE.Initially we demonstrated by RT-PCR that the 3.10 mTEC cell line expressesAire gene corroborating previous data from the literature (Figure 1).We were able in the silencing this gene by RNA interference (RNAi) (Figure2), which although partial, allowed to evidentiate the PTA genes, which were213