AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

The immune system is our primary defense against infection and disease. Immune cells need to recognize and efficiently destroy invasive pathogens while, at the same time, exercising tolerance towards normal cells and tissues within the body. Because pathogenic organisms are constantly evolving to evade detection, the immune system must employ multiple recognition strategies to keep pace. Natural killer (NK) cells have evolved a self versus non-self recognition strategy known as “missing self” that is based upon the recognition of self major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules by stochastically expressed inhibitory receptors on the surface of NK cells. When MHC expression is downregulated by a virus or cellular transformation event, the dampening signals that balance against NK cell activation are lost due to a lack of inhibitory receptor engagement. This lack of inhibitory signaling, along with the engagement of activating receptors, leads to the elimination of the distressed cell through targeted NK cell-mediated cytotoxicity. The work presented in this manuscript focuses on the transcriptional regulation of a critically important family of human NK cell inhibitory receptors known as killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR). The KIR genes are present within the leukocyte receptor complex on chromosome 19 and are expressed in a variegated, clonally restricted pattern on fully differentiated NK cells. How this pattern of gene expression is regulated during NK cell development is not well understood despite the demonstrated clinical relevance of KIR during hematopoietic cell transplantation to treat patients with leukemia, the influence of the KIR repertoire on the progression of HIV to AIDS, and the importance of KIR during pregnancy. Progress in the elucidation of how KIR genes are regulated has been slow due to the complexity of the KIR locus and the lack of KIR genes in mice, which are much more amenable to genetic manipulation. We have shown that the 5’ upstream regulatory region of each KIR gene contains a previously uncharacterized distal promoter with a functional c-Myc binding site. Stimulation of primary peripheral blood NK cells with IL-15 induces c-Myc binding at the distal promoter, which acts to promote KIR transcription. We also found that the overexpression of c-Myc protein in the NK92 cell line, which lacks surface KIR due to dense methylation of CpG dinucleotides proximal to the transcriptional start site, causes de novo surface KIR expression. Taken together, these results suggest that IL-15 directly promotes KIR transcription by inducing the binding of c-Myc to the distal promoter. We hypothesize that the recruitment of c-Myc and the initiation of active transcription from the distal promoter may also be key steps in the removal of repressive epigenetic marks within KIR promoters during human NK cell development to allow for stable gene expression. In addition to identifying a novel distal promoter, our group has found that the conventional proximal KIR…