The thymus is the primary lymphoid organ responsible for the development and training of T-cells. The maturation of the bone-marrow derived T-cell precursors, the thymocytes, to the functional T-cells involves several tightly controlled steps and checkpoints and aims to result in a T-cell pool that recognizes foreign pathogens but remains tolerant to the body’s own antigens.
Although the thymocytes at different developmental stages comprise the majority of thymic cells, the thymus also contains several other hematopoietic as well as non-hematopoietic cells that all play their role in establishing the functional T-cell pool. Understanding the function of all these cells and their specific role in directing the development of thymocytes is thus essential to understanding the mechanisms behind the development of adaptive immunity, central tolerance induction, and several diseases related to defective T-cell responses.
Recent advances in molecular biology techniques such as single cell-based RNA seq, ATAC seq, and spatial transcriptomics as well as novel genetic labeling and visualization methods have opened up enormous new possibilities for the discovery of novel thymic cell types and functions, progenitor identification, developmental dynamics of cell lineages and cell-cell interactions. Although the first studies using the single cell-based approaches have already set new milestones in thymic cell heterogeneity the potential of these novel methods is still nearly unlimited in discovering novel aspects of thymic function in health, aging, and disease.
The goal of this research topic is to accumulate research that uses these novel molecular biology techniques in order to characterize the heterogeneity of thymic cells and their functions to obtain a novel insight into the generation of the functional T-cell pool.
We welcome submissions that cover, but are not limited to, the following sub-topics:
• Studies on normal human and animal thymic cells at different stages of development and aging that characterize developmental dynamics, cell interactions, epigenomic or transcriptomic landscape at single-cell level
• Studies on genetically modified animals and on human patients with thymus-related diseases to establish novel pathways of cellular development, aging, and disease development at single-cell level
The thymus is the primary lymphoid organ responsible for the development and training of T-cells. The maturation of the bone-marrow derived T-cell precursors, the thymocytes, to the functional T-cells involves several tightly controlled steps and checkpoints and aims to result in a T-cell pool that recognizes foreign pathogens but remains tolerant to the body’s own antigens.
Although the thymocytes at different developmental stages comprise the majority of thymic cells, the thymus also contains several other hematopoietic as well as non-hematopoietic cells that all play their role in establishing the functional T-cell pool. Understanding the function of all these cells and their specific role in directing the development of thymocytes is thus essential to understanding the mechanisms behind the development of adaptive immunity, central tolerance induction, and several diseases related to defective T-cell responses.
Recent advances in molecular biology techniques such as single cell-based RNA seq, ATAC seq, and spatial transcriptomics as well as novel genetic labeling and visualization methods have opened up enormous new possibilities for the discovery of novel thymic cell types and functions, progenitor identification, developmental dynamics of cell lineages and cell-cell interactions. Although the first studies using the single cell-based approaches have already set new milestones in thymic cell heterogeneity the potential of these novel methods is still nearly unlimited in discovering novel aspects of thymic function in health, aging, and disease.
The goal of this research topic is to accumulate research that uses these novel molecular biology techniques in order to characterize the heterogeneity of thymic cells and their functions to obtain a novel insight into the generation of the functional T-cell pool.
We welcome submissions that cover, but are not limited to, the following sub-topics:
• Studies on normal human and animal thymic cells at different stages of development and aging that characterize developmental dynamics, cell interactions, epigenomic or transcriptomic landscape at single-cell level
• Studies on genetically modified animals and on human patients with thymus-related diseases to establish novel pathways of cellular development, aging, and disease development at single-cell level