The transcription repressor BCL6 plays an essential role in the formation and function of germinal centers (GCs). While normal B cells promptly shut off BCL6 when they exit the GC, many GC-derived B-cell lymphomas sustain BCL6 expression through chromosomal translocations and activating mutations. We have previously shown that a common effect of lymphoma-associated BCL6 gene alterations is to bypass a negative autoregulatory loop that controls its transcription. In this study, we report that BCL6 autoregulation is independent of several known corepressor complexes including silencing mediator for retinoid and thyroid hormone receptors, nuclear receptor coreceptor, BCL6 corepressor, and MTA3/NuRD. Furthermore, we show that BCL6 can interact with the CtBP (C-terminal binding protein) corepressor both in vitro and in vivo and that CtBP is recruited by BCL6 to its 5 regulatory region. In lymphoma cell lines carrying BCL6 translocations, small interfering RNA-mediated CtBP knock-down selectively relieved the previously silenced wild-type BCL6 allele but not the translocated alleles, which are driven by heterologous promoters. These results demonstrate that CtBP is a novel BCL6 corepressor and suggest that a unique corepressor requirement for BCL6 autoregulation may allow GC B cells to differentially control the expression of BCL6 and other BCL6 target genes in response to environmental stimuli during the GC stage of B cell development.BCL6 is a sequence-specific transcription repressor that is required for the formation of germinal centers (GC), and its deregulated expression underlies development of many GCderived B-cell lymphomas (12,44,47). Expression of BCL6 is developmentally regulated such that in the B-cell lineage, high levels of BCL6 are restricted to the GC stage. GC are dynamic and specialized structures in the secondary lymphoid organs within which B cells undergo immunoglobulin class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation to produce diverse, high-affinity antibodies (17,26). Widely considered to be the master regulator of the GC stage of B-cell development, BCL6 maintains the GC-specific gene expression program by silencing genes involved in B-cell activation (CD69, CD80, and NF-B1), response to DNA damage (TP53 and ATR), cell-cycle regulation (CCND2, CDKN1B, and CDKN1A), and plasma cell differentiation (PRDM1) (25,29,34,37,38,40,41). Thus, neither the memory nor the plasma cell differentiation program can be initiated until expression and activity of BCL6 are extinguished by GC exit signals.BCL6 is a 95-kDa phosphoprotein with six Krüppel-type zinc fingers (ZF) at the C terminus and an N-terminal POZ/BTB domain. Our earlier work demonstrated that the maximum repression activity of BCL6 requires the entire POZ/BTB domain as well as a separate middle region, repression domain II (RDII) (7). To date, a variety of BCL6 corepressors have been described. Among the corepressors with well-documented in vivo functions, nuclear receptor coreceptor (NCoR), silencing mediator for retinoid and thyroid hormon...