A special repertoire of alpha:beta T cells in neonatal mice. |
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| Authors: | M Bogue, S Cand ias, C Benoist, D Mathis |
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| Affiliation: | Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eucaryotes du CNRS, Strasbourg, France. |
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| Abstract: | According to several functional criteria, the mature thymocytes of neonatal and adult mice are distinctly different. We wondered whether these differences in function might have a structural correlate: do neonates have a distinct repertoire of alpha:beta T cells? In this study, we have exploited the power of polymerase chain reaction technology to generate large numbers of T cell receptor sequences from sorted thymocyte populations from newborn and adult mice. The newborn-derived sequences show very few N nucleotide additions, usually the major source of diversity in T cell receptors. Most interestingly, the paucity of N insertions appears to be exaggerated by selection events that operate during T cell differentiation in the thymus. The significance of these results is largely: (i) that they parallel recent findings on the B cell repertoire in neonates, raising questions about the reactivities specified by such a special repertoire; and (ii) that they suggest a means to ''tag'' T cells exported perinatally, allowing one to test the premise that autoreactive T cells derive preferentially from the newborn repertoire. |
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