Age dependent collective trafficking of tissue resident T cells in zebrafish

How tissue-resident T cells are organized to provide immune surveillance in healthy peripheral tissues and how this organization changes with age remains largely unknown. Here we use intravital imaging in zebrafish to identify a previously undescribed, appendage-specific mode of adaptive immune organization: fin-resident T cells undergo coordinated collective "streaming" migration within connective tissue compartments. T cells colonize the developing fin prior to lymphatic or blood vessel formation, indicating that initial residency can be established independently of classical immune conduits. However, collective streaming is not immediate; it emerges during juvenile maturation, coincident with maturation of fin architecture, and is restricted to T cells rather than other leukocyte populations. After fin amputation, young adults restore streaming within regenerated tissue once spatial compartments are re-established, whereas middle-aged fish following thymic involution repopulate the fin yet fail to promptly recover coordinated streaming and show broader tissue dispersion and altered motility in comparable times. Transcriptomic profiling across ages, regenerative states, and immune-altered microenvironments reveals coupled regulation of stromal remodeling programs and antigen presentation pathways, including differential expression of MHC class I and II components with strong microenvironmental dependence. These data define an age-regulated, tissue-instructed program that organizes resident T cell dynamics and immune potential in situ, providing a framework for understanding how tissue specific stromal environments constrain immune surveillance.

T cells patrol most organs, but we know surprisingly little about how they are arranged inside healthy tissues over an animal's lifetime. By imaging zebrafish in vivo, we discovered that fin-resident T cells do not move independently: they organize into coordinated "streams" that migrate collectively through fin connective tissue. This collective behavior appears during juvenile maturation, re-forms after regeneration in young adults, and is delayed or disrupted in older fish as age-related thymus decline reduces new T cell production. In parallel, aging and the tissue microenvironment reshape the expression of genes involved in antigen presentation. These results reveal a tissue-specific, age-regulated architecture for adaptive immune surveillance that links aging to impaired immune organization during regeneration.