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Updated: Jan 23, 2026

Isolation, Identification, and Purification of Murine Thymic Epithelial Cells
Published on: August 8, 2014
Interplay between Follistatin, Activin A, and BMP4 Signaling Regulates Postnatal Thymic Epithelial Progenitor Cell
Ailin Lepletier1, Michael L Hun1, Maree V Hammett1
1Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia.
Abstract:
A key feature of immune functional impairment with age is the progressive involution of thymic tissue responsible for naive T cell production. In this study, we identify two major phases of thymic epithelial cell (TEC) loss during aging: a block in mature TEC differentiation from the pool of immature precursors, occurring at the onset of puberty, followed by impaired bipotent TEC progenitor differentiation and depletion of Sca-1lo cTEC and mTEC lineage-specific precursors. We reveal that an increase in follistatin production by aging TECs contributes to their own demise. TEC loss occurs primarily through the antagonism of activin A signaling, which we show is required for TEC maturation and acts in dissonance to BMP4, which promotes the maintenance of TEC progenitors. These results support a model in which an imbalance of activin A and BMP4 signaling underpins the degeneration of postnatal TEC maintenance during aging, and its reversal enables the transient replenishment of mature TECs.
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