WIKIMEDIA, NCIAt birth, the human body is brimming with naive T cells, immune cells generated in the thymus that have yet to encounter a pathogen. Production of these cells declines with age, but they persist in the body to muster an immune response against novel invaders. In a Science Immunology paper published today (December 2), Columbia University researchers explore the mechanisms behind such persistence, showing that these cell populations are sequestered in lymphoid tissue and that each lymphoid site maintains a unique set of naive T cell clones.
“It’s really nice to have this in the human and across all of these different tissues. [The authors] confirm many of the things that were established in different models,” said Janko Nikolich-Zugich, an immunologist and gerontologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved with the research. “The compartmentalization [of naive T cells] is the biggest story.”
Previous studies of immune cell populations in people relied on blood samples to pick up circulating T cells, but the Columbia team took a different approach. In partnership with an organ procurement organization in New York City called LiveOnNY, the researchers obtained donor tissue from the thymus, lymph nodes, and spleen, then analyzed the cell content.
“After the teams come to get organs for lifesaving transplantation, we ...
