WIKIMEDIA, NIAID/NIHEach newly-formed T cell bears a unique T cell receptor (TCR) that recognizes a particular antigen. But how a given TCR shapes the fate of its cell and that cell’s progeny was largely unknown. Today (August 26), scientists at MIT report in Science Immunology on their discovery that precursor T cells with precisely the same TCR don’t necessarily follow the same developmental path.
“The main take-home message is that T cells with identical specificity . . . can really differentiate into very distinct subtypes of T cell depending on the environment in which they are located,” said mucosal immunologist Daniel Mucida of Rockefeller University in New York who was not involved in the study.
During T cell development, the genes encoding the TCR are shuffled and recombined by special genetic mechanisms to create an individual version of the receptor protein expressed on the cell’s surface. A variety of T cell types exist: some, like helper and cytotoxic T cells, promote strong immune responses against foreign invaders, while others. like T regulatory cells (T regs), suppress excessive inflammation. It has been observed that the repertoire of TCRs found on ...
