Back

Gene regulatory network determinants of rapid recall in human memory CD4+ T cells

Katko, A.; Korinfskaya, S.; Bejjani, A. T.; Owoeye, S. M.; Yang, Z. F.; Rudrapatna, A.; Wayman, J. A.; Kotliar, M.; Kottyan, L. C.; Barski, A.; Miraldi, E. R.

2025-04-10 systems biology
10.1101/2025.04.06.646912 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Rapid recall is the hallmark of memory T cells. While naive cells require days to mount effector responses to new threats, antigen-experienced memory cells produce cytokines within hours of repeat encounter. Memory establishment and the control of rapid recall across lifespan is poorly understood. Epigenetic poising is a likely mechanism. Compared to naive, memory cells exhibit enhanced chromatin accessibility proximal to rapid recall genes, but the transcription factors (TFs) that establish, maintain and utilize these putative regulatory elements are unknown. We leverage single-nuclei (sn)multiome-seq (snRNA-seq and snATAC-seq) to characterize the dynamic activation responses of CD4+ T cell subsets and (2) reconstruct the underlying gene regulatory networks. Memory-associated TFs (MAF, PRDM1, RUNX2, SMAD3, KLF6) were predicted to orchestrate rapid recall. KLF6 binding to its predicted target genes was confirmed by ChIP-seq, while the memory-associated activities of all five factors replicated in independent scRNA-seq studies. Integrating GWAS data, we nominate CD4+ T cell populations and gene regulatory mechanisms that might underly genetic risk to immune-mediated diseases.

Published in Cell Reports (predicted rank #2) · training set

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.