My main area of research is immunology, specifically the role of the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) gene in the negative selection of T cells in the thymus, a process which trains T cells to distinguish self from non-self and avoid autoimmune disease.
It has been long established that AIRE triggers the expression of tissue-restricted genes in the thymus, allowing developing T cells to be exposed to proteins found normally in only specific tissues of the body. Recently we have shown that AIRE also plays a role in alternative splicing in medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs), and furthermore that mTECs express a range of tissue-specific alternative splice isoforms. Our results suggest that AIRE plays a role in this promiscuous splicing, representing a novel aspect of its role in negative selection.
Our paper describing this work can be found here.
Supplementary materials
Supplementary tables for chapter 4 of my thesis can be found here (.xlsx file)