Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Immunol. Nov 27, 2015; 5(3): 99-112
Published online Nov 27, 2015. doi: 10.5411/wji.v5.i3.99
RNA polymerases in plasma cells trav-ELL2 the beat of a different drum
Sage M Smith, Nolan T Carew, Christine Milcarek
Sage M Smith, Nolan T Carew, Christine Milcarek, Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States
Author contributions: Smith SM and Carew NT contributed equally to this work; Smith SM and Carew NT reviewed literature and wrote text; Milcarek C suggested the theme to be reviewed, reviewed literature, wrote text, and served as principal investigator for primary data.
Supported by The National Science Foundation grant MCB-0842725; National Institutes of Health shared resources Grant No. P30CA047904 to the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute; and internal funding from the School of Medicine and Department of Immunology.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The above-mentioned authors hereby declare to have no conflicting interests, including but not limited to commercial, personal, political, intellectual, or religious, related to the work submitted.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Dr. Christine Milcarek, PhD, Professor of Immunology, Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, 200 Lothrop St., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States. milcarek@pitt.edu
Telephone: +1-412-6489098 Fax: +1-412-3838096
Received: June 26, 2015
Peer-review started: June 27, 2015
First decision: July 28, 2015
Revised: October 23, 2015
Accepted: November 13, 2015
Article in press: November 17, 2015
Published online: November 27, 2015
Processing time: 153 Days and 20 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: B cell differentiation to antibody secreting cells is a highly regulated, complex process facilitated by factors such as interferon regulatory factor 4, Blimp-1, OCA-B, Xbp1, and mammalian target of rapamycin. This results in a switch in immunoglobulin mRNA processing from the membrane-bound to the secretory-specific form, occurring when ELL2 releases RNAP-II pausing during transcription elongation and causes exon skipping and proximal poly(A) site choice.