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Related Experiment Videos

Thymic selection: to thine own self be true.

Alexandra Kitz¹, David A Hafler¹

¹Departments of Neurology and Immunobiology, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.

|May 21, 2015

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Self-reactive T cells are found in the body, even after the immune system prunes its repertoire. Clonal deletion removes many T cells but fails to eliminate all self-reactive clones.

Related Experiment Videos

Area of Science:

Immunology
T cell biology

Background:

Self-reactive T cells pose a risk for autoimmune diseases.
The thymus is responsible for eliminating potentially harmful T cells through clonal deletion.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the fate of self-reactive T cell clones during repertoire development.
To determine if clonal deletion completely removes self-reactive T cells.

Main Methods:

Analysis of T cell repertoire in mice.
Identification and characterization of T cell clones.

Main Results:

Clonal deletion effectively prunes the T cell repertoire.
A subset of self-reactive T cell clones persists despite clonal deletion.
These persistent self-reactive T cells are found in the periphery.

Conclusions:

Clonal deletion is an incomplete process for eliminating self-reactive T cells.
The persistence of self-reactive T cells may have implications for immune tolerance and autoimmunity.