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Cutting Edge: Contact with Secondary Lymphoid Organs Drives Postthymic T Cell Maturation^1,2

Department of Immunology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195

T cell development, originally thought to be completed in the thymus, has recently been shown to continue for several weeks in the lymphoid periphery. The forces that drive this peripheral maturation are unclear. The use of mice transgenic for GFP driven by the RAG2 promoter has enabled the ready identification and analysis of recent thymic emigrants. Here, we show that recent thymic emigrant maturation is a progressive process and is promoted by T cell exit from the thymus. Further, we show that this maturation occurs within secondary lymphoid organs and does not require extensive lymphocyte recirculation.

The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

¹ This work was supported by grants from the Cancer Research Institute’s Predoctoral Emphasis Pathway in Tumor Immunology Program (to E.G.H.) and the German foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (to R.N.) and by National Institutes of Health Grants R21 AG 023781 and AI 064318 (to P.J.F.).

² The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

³ Current address: Department of Cellular and Molecular Immunology, Max Planck Institute of Immunology, Freiburg 79108, Germany.

⁴ Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Pamela Fink, Department of Immunology, University of Washington, I-607H Health Sciences Center, Box 357650, 1959 Northeast Pacific Street, Seattle, WA 98195. E-mail address: pfink{at}u.washington.edu

⁵ Abbreviations used in this paper: RTE, recent thymic emigrant; AAL-R, 2-amino-4-(4-heptyloxyphenyl)-2-methylbutanol; AAL-S, biologically inactive enantiomer of AAL-R; LN, lymph node; MFI, mean fluorescence intensity; SLO, secondary lymphoid organ; S1P, sphingosine 1-phosphate; S1P₁, sphingosine 1-phosphate receptor 1; SP, single positive; Tg, transgenic; VLA-4, very late Ag 4.

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				L. E. Makaroff, D. W. Hendricks, R. E. Niec, and P. J. Fink Postthymic maturation influences the CD8 T cell response to antigen PNAS, March 24, 2009; 106(12): 4799 - 4804. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]