The role of Bcl6 in T-cell development

T-cells are white blood cells that enable us to fight infectious disease by attacking infections and also by coordinating the immune response. T-cells are produced in an organ called the thymus. The thymus is essential, as people born without a thymus have no T-cells and cannot fight infectious disease.

The thymus is also important because it ensures that the T-cells that are produced do not attack our own bodies (they are tolerant to self), and it produces a type of T-cells that are required to dampen down the immune response, called regulatory T-cells.

When the thymus does not work properly, several different kinds of diseases arise: we could become immunodeficient because we do not have enough T-cells; we could develop autoimmune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis or type I diabetes, because our T-cells attack our own bodies and organs; finally, if T-cell expansion and development are not properly controlled we may develop leukaemia (blood cancer).

It is therefore very important to understand what controls the development of T-cells in the thymus and to understand how T-cells are made to be tolerant to self, and also how regulatory T-cells are produced to control the immune response.

In this project we will investigate how a protein called Bcl6 contributes to controlling how T-cells and regulatory T-cells are produced and how T-cells are made self-tolerant.

Bcl6 is a protein called a transcription factor which functions to control which set of genes are expressed in different types of cells. Therefore we will also investigate which genes are regulated by Bcl6 in developing T-cells.