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Blood, 26 March 2009, Vol. 113, No. 13, pp. 2965-2975. Prepublished online as a Blood First Edition Paper on January 6, 2009; DOI 10.1182/blood-2008-07-165167.
IMMUNOBIOLOGY Leaky severe combined immunodeficiency and aberrant DNA rearrangements due to a hypomorphic RAG1 mutation1 Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; 2 Department of Immunobiology, Yale Medical School, New Haven, CT; Departments of 3 Pathology and 4 Human Genetics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and 5 Howard Hughes Medical Institute and 6 The Children's Hospital, Immune Disease Institute, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
The RAG1/2 endonuclease initiates programmed DNA rearrangements in progenitor lymphocytes by generating double-strand breaks at specific recombination signal sequences. This process, known as V(D)J recombination, assembles the vastly diverse antigen receptor genes from numerous V, D, and J coding segments. In vitro biochemical and cellular transfection studies suggest that RAG1/2 may also play postcleavage roles by forming complexes with the recombining ends to facilitate DNA end processing and ligation. In the current study, we examine the in vivo consequences of a mutant form of RAG1, RAG1-S723C, that is proficient for DNA cleavage, yet exhibits defects in postcleavage complex formation and end joining in vitro. We generated a knockin mouse model harboring the RAG1-S723C hypomorphic mutation and examined the immune system in this fully in vivo setting. RAG1-S723C homozygous mice exhibit impaired lymphocyte development and decreased V(D)J rearrangements. Distinct from RAG nullizygosity, the RAG1-S723C hypomorph results in aberrant DNA double-strand breaks within rearranging loci. RAG1-S723C also predisposes to thymic lymphomas associated with chromosomal translocations in a p53 mutant background, and heterozygosity for the mutant allele accelerates age-associated immune system dysfunction. Thus, our study provides in vivo evidence that implicates aberrant RAG1/2 activity in lymphoid tumor development and premature immunosenescence.
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