Back

Basic-Leucine-Zipper Transcription Factors Regulate Selective Molecular Phenotypes in Regulatory T Cells During IL-2-Induced Activation

Tse, J.; Liu, X.; Eres, I.; Yamawaki, T.; Kanke, M.; Killian, M.; Amrute, J.; Chaudhry, A.; Sahoo, A.; Liu, W.-J.; Kao, C.-Y.; Luo, X.; Lu, J.; Lu, D.; Wang, S.; Martin, S.; Li, C.-M.

2025-02-26 genomics
10.1101/2025.02.25.638325 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Regulatory T (Treg) cells have long been recognized as modulators of immunological tolerance and homeostasis. Previously, we used scRNA-seq to reveal significant Treg heterogeneity in response to IL-2-induced activation. Herein, we leveraged enrichment analyses, as well as bulk and single-nucleus multi-omics in splenic and lung Tregs, to uncover and confirm the importance of transcription factors (TFs) and chromatin remodeling in Treg activation. Multiple bZIP TF motifs showed increased chromatin accessibility post IL-2 treatment, with correlated transcriptional changes resembling Th1 and Th2 molecular phenotypes, further confirmed by spatial ATAC-seq. By combining gene perturbation and CUT&RUN assays before and after Treg stimulation, we show that bZIP TFs, such as BATF and BACH1, are critical to IL-2-induced Treg activation, coordinating epigenetic and transcriptional changes that selectively drive T-helper phenotypes and metabolic pathways.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.