Plasmacytoid, conventional, and monocyte-derived dendritic cells undergo a profound and convergent genetic reprogramming during their maturation

International audienceDCs express receptors sensing microbial, danger or cytokine signals, which when triggered in combination drive DC maturation and functional polarization. Maturation was proposed to result from a discrete number of modifications in conventional DCs (cDCs), in contrast to a cell-fate conversion in plasmacytoid DCs (pDCs). cDC matura-tion is generally assessed by measuring cytokine production and membrane expression of MHC class II and co-stimulation molecules. pDC maturation complexity was demonstrated by functional genomics. Here, pDCs and cDCs were shown to undergo profound and convergent changes in their gene expression programs in vivo during viral infection. This observation was generalized to other stimulation conditions and DC subsets, by public microarray data analyses, PCR confirmation of selected gene expression profiles, and gene regulatory sequence bioinformatics analyses. Thus, maturation is a complex process similarly reshaping all DC subsets, including through the induction of a core set of NF-κB-or IFN-stimulated genes irrespective of stimuli. Keywords: Dendritic cell subsets r Gene expression profiling r Human r Maturation r Mouse Additional supporting information may be found in the online version of this article at the publisher's web-sit