Human in vitro induced T regulatory cells and memory T cells share common demethylation of specific FOXP3 promoter region

摘要

BackgroundThe FOXP3 gene is the master regulator for T regulatory cells and is under tight DNA methylation control at the Treg specific demethylated region (TSDR) in its first intron. This said, methylation of its promoter region, the significance of which is unknown, has also been associated with various immune-related disease states such as asthma, food allergy, auto-immunity and cancer. Here, we used induced T regulatory cells (iTreg) as a target cell population to identify candidate hypomethylated CpG sites in the FOXP3 gene promoter to design a DNA methylation quantitative assay for this region.