Thymic nurse cells and thymic repopulation after whole body sublethal irradiation in mice

Thymic Nurse Cells (TNCs) are lymphoepithelial complexes which are thought to play a role in the early stages of the intrathymic differentiation pathway. Therefore, their repopulation kinetics were analyzed in mice after sublethal whole-body irradiation. Changes of the number of TNCs per thymus were parallel with the evolution of the whole thymocyte population. Particularly, a first wave of TNCs restoration was followed by a secondary depletion and a final recovery. This suggests that TNCs restoration is related to the proliferating progeny of intrathymic radioresistant thymocytes. When normal bone marrow cells were grafted intravenously after irradiation, no secondary depletion was found. This pattern of restoration was obviously related to thymic repopulation by cells which were derived from the inoculated bone marrow. Homing studies with FITC labelled bone marrow cells showed that inoculated bone marrow cells did not penetrate TNCs early after irradiation. Later on, when immigrant cells started to proliferate, they were found preferentially within TNCs before spreading in the whole thymus. The results indicate that interactions between immature thymocytes and epithelial cells within TNCs are critical for the first steps of intrathymic lymphopoiesis.