First Author | Heilig JS | Year | 1986 |
Journal | Nature | Volume | 322 |
Issue | 6082 | Pages | 836-40 |
PubMed ID | 2943999 | Mgi Jnum | J:31508 |
Mgi Id | MGI:79017 | Doi | 10.1038/322836a0 |
Citation | Heilig JS, et al. (1986) Diversity of murine gamma genes and expression in fetal and adult T lymphocytes. Nature 322(6082):836-40 |
abstractText | The search for the genes encoding the T-cell receptor alpha and chains revealed a third gene, T gamma (ref. 1), which shares with t T alpha (refs 2-7) and T beta (refs 8-15) genes a number of structure features, including somatic rearrangement during T-cell development. T gamma gene expression appears to be unnecessary in son mature T cells and is at its greatest in fetal thymocytes encouraging speculation that T gamma has a role in T-cell development and may be involved in the recognition of polymorphic major histocompatibility complex (MHC) products during thymic education. One argument against the participation of T gamma in such a process has been its apparently limited diversity, due to the small number of gene segments available for rearrangement. We here describe the identification of additional T gamma V-gene segments and demonstrate that they can be rearranged to previously identified J- and C-gene segments and are expressed in fetal thymocytes. In addition we describe a variety of patterns of T gamma mRNA processing which may be significant for T gamma gene regulation. |