The thymus in the age of retirement (original) (raw)

Immunology

Nature volume 396, pages 630–631 (1998)Cite this article

In 1962, Miller1 recognized that removing the thymus from newborn mice severely affected their immunological responses. Since then, immunologists have wondered whether or not the adult thymus still contributes to the peripheral T-cell pool by generating new T lymphocytes. This issue is of both conceptual and practical interest owing to the enormous size of the T-cell antigen receptor (TCR) repertoire — the sum of all TCR recognition specificities.

The TCR repertoire is established early in life and is estimated to contain at least around 108 distinct specificities. Newly generated thymic emigrants colonize the peripheral immune system as ‘naive’ T cells. After an immune response in which T cells provide help or cytotoxic activity, they either die or enter a memory compartment. Because T cells can be extremely long-lived, we cannot say whether the TCR repertoire in, say, a 70-year-old, was exclusively generated in his youth, or whether T-cells generated throughout life have contributed to the diversity of his TCR repertoire. Although naive and memory T cells can be distinguished by phenotype, there has been no assay for measuring thymic output in humans.

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  1. the Basel Institute for Immunology, Grenzacherstrasse 487, Basel, CH-4005, Switzerland
    Hans-Reimer Rodewald

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  1. Hans-Reimer Rodewald
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Rodewald, HR. The thymus in the age of retirement.Nature 396, 630–631 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/25251

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