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Review
Nature Reviews Immunology 3, 890–899 (1 November 2003) | doi:10.1038/nri1225
Regulating antigen-receptor gene assembly
Abstract
The genes encoding antigen receptors are unique because of their high diversity and their assembly in developing lymphocytes from gene segments through a series of site-specific DNA recombination reactions known as V(D)J rearrangement. This review focuses on our understanding of how recombination of immunoglobulin and T-cell receptor gene segments is tightly regulated despite being catalysed by a common lymphoid recombinase, which recognizes a widely distributed conserved recombination signal sequence. Probable mechanisms involve precise expression of the lymphoid-restricted recombination-activating genes RAG1 and RAG2, and developmentally regulated epigenetic alterations in template accessibility, which are targeted by transcriptional regulatory elements and involve chromatin-modifying enzymes.
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