“…Briefly, mice (n = 3 animals/group) were euthanized and immediately thereafter brains, spinal cords, thymic and spleens were harvested, washed thoroughly with ice-cold 0.01 M phosphate-buffered saline (PBS, Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA) containing a protease inhibitor cocktail (4 µM staurosporine, 1 mM α-naphthyl phosphate and 1 mM sodium orthovanadate) to prevent protein degradation during sample preparation and then snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen. Frozen samples were pulverized, solubilized (∼1 µl/1 µg tissue) in pre-chilled lysis buffer (25 mM Tris, 1 mM EDTA, 1 mM EGTA, 150 mM NaCl and 1% Triton x-100) and centrifuged at 125,000 g, 4 • C, for 1 h. Total protein in the supernatant was quantified in each sample using the EZQ protein quantitation kit (Life Technologies, Eugene, OR, USA) with bovine serum albumin (Amresco, Solon, OH, USA) as a calibration standard (Butt and Coorssen, 2005;Churchward et al, 2005). Thymus, spleen, brain, spinal cord and standard purified CD4/8 recombinant proteins (Sino Biological, Wayne, PA, USA) were resolved by 10% sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE; 100 V for 2 h at 4 • C) and then transferred onto polyvinylidene difluoride membrane (PVDF, 0.22 µM pore size, Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA, USA) for 2 h at 4 • C; transfer efficiency, determined as previously described (Sen et al, 2019a), was 95.6 ± 1.7% (Supplementary Figures S1A,B).…”