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Updated: Aug 18, 2026

Mouse Naïve CD4+ T Cell Isolation and In vitro Differentiation into T Cell Subsets
Published on: April 16, 2015
Highly efficient selection of CD4 and CD8 lineage thymocytes supports an instructive model of lineage commitment
1Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley 94720, USA.
Abstract:
We undertook a kinetic analysis of the generation of mature T cells in TCR and coreceptor transgenic mice using BrdU labeling. We observed that the selection efficiency of mature CD4-CD8+ and CD4+CD8- thymocytes could be as high as 40% and 90% of CD4+CD8+ precursors, respectively. The surprisingly high efficiency of selection favors an instructional model of lineage commitment and is incompatible with a stochastic model in which the efficiency of selection would be no greater than 100% in both lineages combined.
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