2, black bars, right Y-axis), and that led to decreasing expression of endogenous miR-221 (Fig. 2A, white bars, left Y-axis) and miR-222 (Fig. 2B, white bars, left Y-axis). We conclude that Pax5 downregulates, either directly or indirectly, the expression of miR-221 and miR-222. We retrovirally introduced a doxycycline-inducible system of overexpression of miR-221 and miR-222 in Pax5+/+ pre-B-I cells to test whether miR-221 or miR-222 has

a modifying effect on the differentiation or migration of pre-B-I cells. In this system GFP becomes expressed when mature miRNA is formed by splicing [21, 22] (Supporting Information selleck chemical Fig. 2A and B). We assayed the overexpression

of miR-221 by quantitative real-time PCR with a probe specific for the mature miR-221 and confirmed its time-dependent overexpression (Supporting Information Fig. 2C). The highest upregulation of miR-221 (14- and 18-fold, compared with that of the empty vector control) was detected 24 and 72 hours after addition of 1 μg/mL doxy-cycline. We used a luciferase reporter assay to test the function of miR-221 to downregulate gene expression (Supporting Information Fig. 3). The results show that expressed, mature miR-221 functions to reduce luciferase activity by inhibiting the translation of the luciferase gene. To test whether single overexpression of miR-221 would revert the B cell-monopotency of the pre-B-I cell line back to the multi-myeloid/lymphoid potency of the miR-221/miR-222 expressing MPPs and

HSCs, transduced AP24534 price cells were cultured under conditions that allow Pax5−/− cells to develop to CD4/CD8 double Thymidine kinase negative, and to CD4+CD8+ T-lineage cells in vitro [23]. The different transduced pre-B-I-cell lines failed to develop to T-lineage cells (Supporting Information Fig. 4). In addition, none of the miRNAs downregulated the expression of CD19 (Supporting Information Fig. 2B). We conclude that overexpression of these miRNAs did not induce dedifferentiation of pre-B-I cells to the earlier, CD19−flt3+ multipotent CLP-like pro-/pre-B cell stage of B cell differentiation. To test the in vivo differentiation and migration potential of the rtTA/tetO-miRNA-double-transduced pre-B-I cells we established a series of pre-B-I-cell lines from 18 day-old CD45.1+C57BL/6J fetal liver. These CD45.1+ pre-B-cell lines can be detected in the CD45.2+ host also by their GFP expression in the presence of doxycycline, when they express mature miRNA. It also allows the capacity of these cell lines to mature in the host to CD45.1+CD19+sIgM+ B cells to be measured, as long as they still express doxycycline-induced miRNA/GFP, or after doxycycline removal when they no longer express miRNA/GFP.