A virtual culture of CD4+ T lymphocytes

The CD4+ T cell lineages Th1, Th2, Th17, and Treg, are mammalian cell types that differentiate from the common precursor naive CD4+ T cell. While there is a wealth of experimental data regarding the molecular and cellular signals involved in the differentiation of CD4+ T cells in vitro, there is still no consensus regarding the structure of the network of interactions at the molecular and cellular levels controlling this differentiation process. In this work, a virtual culture of cells is constructed by interconnecting several instances of an updated version of the regulatory network controlling the differentiation process of CD4+ T cells in mice. The virtual culture is a multi-compartment model with an instance of a regulatory network inside each compartment, thus simulating a simplified version of a cell culture in a well-stirred reactor. The virtual culture is able to describe the stable molecular expression patterns described for fully differentiated CD4+ T cells in mice, as well as the differentiation process from a precursor to a given effector cell in response to specific molecular stimuli.