Project name: Mus musculus

Description: In order to repeatedly mount successful immune responses against a wide range of pathogens, vertebrates must maintain sufficient numbers of diversely specific T cells over a long time. The cellular principles ensuring this are not clear. We show that the density of an antigen-specific T cell population is regulated by neighboring T cells not specific for the same antigen. Their activity is nevertheless T cell specific, due to the shared recognition of a self-peptide. Such regulation was sufficient to prevent autoimmune arthritis even in a lymphopenic model system without other regulatory T cells. This homeostatic strategy, based on the specific recognition of unique sub-threshold ligands, avoids excessive loss of bystander specificities during multiple immune responses, preserving the valuable diversity of the T cell repertoire.Overall design: Ten of the centi-pools selected from screening that showed very high or no "deletor" activity against 5C.C7 T cells were analyzed for gene expression patterns that may correlate with their activity. The reference sample consisted of RNA from Mouse T cells (Naïve, Memory, and Tolerant) that were mixed in equal proportion.

Data type: Transcriptome or Gene expression

Sample scope: Multiisolate

Relevance: ModelOrganism

Last updated: 2012-01-19