PubMed ID
21124839
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Pathology; Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology; Department of Medicine, Diabetes Division; Program in Immunology and Virology; Program in Molecular Medicine
Date
11-24-2010
Document Type
Article
Subjects
Adoptive Transfer; Animals; Antigen-Presenting Cells; Antigens, CD4; CD4-Positive T-Lymphocytes; CD8-Positive T-Lymphocytes; Female; Flow Cytometry; Male; Mice; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Mice, Knockout; Mice, Transgenic; Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell; Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; Spleen; T-Lymphocytes; Thymus Gland; Time Factors; Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha
Disciplines
Immunology and Infectious Disease | Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences
Abstract
The peripheral naive T cell pool is comprised of a heterogeneous population of cells at various stages of development, which is a process that begins in the thymus and is completed after a post-thymic maturation phase in the periphery. One hallmark of naive T cells in secondary lymphoid organs is their unique ability to produce TNF rapidly after activation and prior to acquiring other effector functions. To determine how maturation influences the licensing of naive T cells to produce TNF, we compared cytokine profiles of CD4(+) and CD8(+) single positive (SP) thymocytes, recent thymic emigrants (RTEs) and mature-naive (MN) T cells during TCR activation. SP thymocytes exhibited a poor ability to produce TNF when compared to splenic T cells despite expressing similar TCR levels and possessing comparable activation kinetics (upregulation of CD25 and CD69). Provision of optimal antigen presenting cells from the spleen did not fully enable SP thymocytes to produce TNF, suggesting an intrinsic defect in their ability to produce TNF efficiently. Using a thymocyte adoptive transfer model, we demonstrate that the ability of T cells to produce TNF increases progressively with time in the periphery as a function of their maturation state. RTEs that were identified in NG-BAC transgenic mice by the expression of GFP showed a significantly enhanced ability to express TNF relative to SP thymocytes but not to the extent of fully MN T cells. Together, these findings suggest that TNF expression by naive T cells is regulated via a gradual licensing process that requires functional maturation in peripheral lymphoid organs.
Comments
Citation: Priyadharshini B, Welsh RM, Greiner DL, Gerstein RM, Brehm MA (2010) Maturation-Dependent Licensing of Naive T Cells for Rapid TNF Production. PLoS ONE 5(11): e15038. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015038. Link to article on publisher's site
Copyright: © 2010 Priyadharshini et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.