The thymus is a unique organ with the ability to impart the concept of self-tolerance, or immunological privilege to developing lymphocytes (1, 2). It possesses anatomical compartmentalization in the form of a medulla and cortex (3). To understand the transcriptional behavior of the medullary (mTEC) and cortical epithelial cells (cTEC) of the thymus as they most differ from each other, we performed global differential gene expression profiling using a public microarray dataset of each cell type, isolated from the mouse thymus (4). These analyses revealed that eleven unique ribosomal proteins and pseudogenes were among the most differentially expressed genes when comparing the mTEC transcriptome with the cTEC transcriptome. These data suggest a potential cell-type specific role for these ribosomal subunits and pseudogenes in the epithelial cells of the thymus.
Investigating Tissue- and Organ-specific Phytochrome Responses using FACS-assisted Cell-type Specific Expression Profiling in Arabidopsis thaliana