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Nature Immunology 9, 713–714 (1 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/ni0708-713

New dimensions of CIITA

Walter Reith & Jeremy M Boss

The molecular mechanisms regulating the expression of CIITA have been the subject of intense research by immunologists for more than a decade because it encodes a transcriptional coactivator that functions as the 'master regulator' of the expression of major histocompatibility complex class II genes. The results reported in this issue by Ni et al. bring to light a new and unanticipated complexity in the regulation of interferon-γ (IFN-γ)-induced CIITA expression by showing that it involves a series of five distant enhancers that promote the formation of a complex and dynamic three-dimensional chromatin structure.