Central tolerance induction

Maria L Mouchess1, Mark Anderson

  • 1Diabetes Center, University of California-San Francisco, Box 0540, San Francisco, CA, 94143, USA.

A critical function of the thymus is to help enforce tolerance to self. The importance of central tolerance in preventing autoimmunity has been enlightened by a deeper understanding of the interactions of developing T cells with a diverse population of thymic antigen presenting cell populations. Furthermore, there has been rapid progress in our understanding of how autoreactive T cell specificities are diverted into the T regulatory lineage. Here we review and highlight the recent progress in how tolerance is imposed on the developing thymocyte repertoire.

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