The Orphan Nuclear Receptor NR2F6 Is a Novel Negative Regulator of T-Cell Development.

Abstract 915

The orphan nuclear receptor NR2F6 is a mammalian homologue of the Drosophila seven-up gene that plays key roles in decisions of cell fate in neuroblast and retinal cells. We have previously described a novel role for NR2F6 in decisions of cell fate of mammalian haematopoietic cells of the myeloid cell lineage. We have shown that over-expression of NR2F6 in bone marrow cells impairs differentiation and extends the proliferative capacity of myeloid and early progenitor cells eventually leading to acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), while silencing of NR2F6 expression in AML cell lines causes terminal differentiation and apoptosis. A role of NR2F6 in lymphopoiesis has yet to be identified. Here we describe for the first time a role for NR2F6 in the specification of lymphoid cells. NR2F6 expression is heterogeneous throughout the haematopoietic hierarchy, with expression being highest in long-term repopulating HSCs and generally declining with the differentiation of progenitor cells. We report that over-expression of NR2F6 abrogates the developmental program necessary for T-cell lymphopoiesis. We assessed the effects of NR2F6 on lymphopoiesis in vivo by competitive bone marrow transplantation of NR2F6-IRES-GFP or GFP retrovirally transduced grafts (n=43). Competitive repopulation of lethally irradiated murine hosts with GFP transduced bone marrow cells resulted in successful engraftment and T-cell development, with GFP+ T-cells present in the thymus, and periphery at rates comparable to the percent marked cells in the original graft. However over-expression of NR2F6 placed developing T-cells at a dramatic competitive disadvantage. Six weeks post transplant the proportion of CD3+ cells derived from NR2F6 transduced bone marrow cells was greatly diminished relative to control (more than 10 fold), while at 12 weeks post-transplant we observed an abrogation of CD3+ cells derived from NR2F6 transduced T-cells (with the percentage of NR2F6 transduced CD3+ cells being comparable to staining with IgG control) in both the thymus and periphery. This stark competitive disadvantage was observed in all recipients of NR2F6 transduced grafts. We confirmed that this is not a phenomenon specific to the marker CD3 by analysing a portion of the animals for expression of CD4 and CD8, which again showed a lack of mature t-cells. In a second series of bone marrow transplants, cells transduced with NR2F6 or GFP were purified by fluorescence-activated cell sorting and grafts of 100% transduced cells were transferred by tail vein injection into lethally irradiated recipients. Animals transplanted with NR2F6 transduced bone marrow demonstrated a gross decrease in their thymic size and cellularity (∼10 fold decrease, n=17). Furthermore, the thymus of NR2F6 transduced animals contained a larger proportion of non-transduced, GFP negative residual haematopoietic cells than the vector control animals, corroborating the competitive disadvantage that NR2F6 transduced bone marrow cells face in the thymus. As observed in our previous experiments these animals demonstrated a gross reduction in the proportion of CD3+ cells in the thymus, spleen, lymph nodes and peripheral blood. To rule out the possibility that over-expression of NR2F6 is preventing the trafficking of progenitor cells to the thymus we differentiated NR2F6 or GFP transduced haematopoietic stem cells (lin-,c-kit+,sca-1+) into T-cells in vitro on OP9-DL1 cells. We observed a drastic reduction in the number of cells generated from NR2F6 transduced stem/progenitor cells (>50 fold at day 23), suggesting that expression of NR2F6 greatly impairs T-cell development. Mechanistically, others have shown that NR2F6 functions as a transcriptional repressor inhibiting the transactivating ability of genes such as Runx1. We conjecture that in lymphoid progenitors as well NR2F6 functions as a transcriptional repressor preventing the activation of pathways necessary for T-cell survival, proliferation and lymphopoiesis. Taken together, these data establish that the orphan nuclear receptor NR2F6 is a novel negative regulator of T-cell lymphopoiesis, and demonstrate that down-regulation of NR2F6 is important for the survival and proliferation of T-cell progenitors.