In vivo lineage tracing reveals Axin2-expressing, long-lived cortical thymic epithelial progenitors in the postnatal thymus.

In vivo lineage tracing reveals Axin2-expressing, long-lived cortical thymic epithelial progenitors in the postnatal thymus.

Blog Article

In the thymus, cortical and medullary thymic epithelial cells (TECs) are instrumental for generating a repertoire of functional T cells.Hence, there has been much interest in the ontogeny of TECs.While medullary TEC (mTEC) and bipotent progenitors have been identified, Cleansing Bar the existence of a cortical TEC (cTEC) progenitor remains ambiguous.In this study, we used lineage tracing based on a target gene of the Wnt pathway, Axin2.We found that Axin2 initially labels cells in both the cortical and medullary compartments.

Using Axin2-CreERT2 mice to track the fate of labelled cells, we identified long-lived cortical TEC progenitors that give rise to expanding clones and contribute to homeostasis in postnatal thymus.In contrast, no clonal expansion was found in the medullary or in the K5K8-double positive compartments.The identification of cTEC progenitors and their regulation by Wnt signaling Puzzles have important implications for our understanding of thymus physiology during homeostasis and TEC-related disorders.