Age-Related Disruption of Steady-State Thymic Medulla Provokes Autoimmune Phenotype via Perturbing Negative Selection Jiangyan Xia 1, 2, # ;Hongjun Wang 1, # ;Jianfei Guo 1, 3, # ;Zhijie Zhang 1 ;Brandon Coder 1 ;Dong-Ming Su 1 ; 1 Department of Molecular Biology and Immunology, University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, 76107, USA ; 2 Southeast University Affiliated Zhongda Hospital, Nanjing, China ; 3 Department of Radiology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, TX, 75390, USA ; Figure 2. Expression of Aire and relevant peripheral tissue-specific self-antigens. A Representative immunofluorescence staining of Aire red versus K8 green on cryosections shows decreased Aire expression in early middle-aged fxfx-uCreERT mice. B Summarized ratios of Aire expression measured by % Aire + TECs % K8 + TECs with NIH Image-J software based on immunofluorescence staining in A. n = animal numbers. C Expression levels of Aire, and Aire-dependent tissue-specific self-antigens in 9-month-old early middle-aged fxfx-only and fxfx-uCreER T mice measured by real-time RT-PCR. Spt1 = salivary protein 1; iFABP = intestinal fatty acid binding protein; Chrna1 = Cholinergic Receptor, Nicotinic, Alpha Polypeptide 1. Bar graph shows summarized results of changes in relative fold of mRNA analyzed. Each group includs 4 animals and each animal sample was tested twice. Statistical significance was analyzed by unpaired two-tailed Student’s t -test between the two compared groups. Data show Mean ± SEM. “*” = “ p” value less than 0.05 significant. null,null,3(3),248-259. Doi:null