Absence of the proprotein convertase FURIN in in vitro activated CD8+ T cells (+/- TGFB1 or IL12) modifies the transcriptome of the cells

ABSTRACT: Purpose: FURIN is a member of the proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin (PCSK) family of serine endoproteases important in converting immature proproteins into their functional form. While FURIN is important in various aspects of the immune response such as in CD4+ T cells, FURIN´s role in CD8+ T cells is unclear. Here, we isolated naive CD8+ T cells from conditional T cell specific Furin KO (Cd4-Cre-Furinflox/flox) and WT (Furinflox/flox) mice and studied the genome-wide gene expression pattern upon in vitro anti-CD3/anti-CD28 activation (plate-bound, 5µg/ml each) using RNA sequencing. We also used recombinant TGFB1 (0.5ng/ml) or IL12 (10ng/ml) in the same experimental setting to study their impact on the CD8+ T cell transcriptome. Methods: Total RNA was isolated from the stimulated CD8+ T cells and the RNA-sequencing data was produced by the Functional Genomics Unit of the HiLIFE Genome Analysis Infrastructure (University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland) using Illumina NextSeq High Output 1x75 bp. Data processing pipeline was built on Snakemake wrappers, and used STAR to quantify features from quality and adapter trimmed reads in gene level. Prior the normalisation and differential gene expression analysis with DESeq2, the matrix of raw gene counts was prefiltered to keep only rows that have at least 10 reads in total. Result tables were annotated with biomaRt. Results: Snakemake preprocessing pipeline measured 55573 genes against GRCm38, ENSEMBL release 97. 17714 of them was used for statistical testing. Full result tables for each treatment were ranked by p-value and the normalized DESeq2 abundances in samples were included. The genes with BH-adjusted p-value <0.05 was considered differentially expressed. Conclusions: Our study revealed that the abscence of FURIN influences the expression of several genes in activated CD8+ T cells. Additionally, although FURIN-deficient CD8+ T cells can respond to exogenous TGFB1 and IL12, administrating these cytokines further increases the number of differentially expressed genes between Furin KO and WT CD8+ T cells.

ORGANISM(S): Mus musculus

PROVIDER: GSE186810 | GEO | 2023/04/28

REPOSITORIES: GEO