ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Thymic nurse cells provide microenvironment for secondary T cell receptor α rearrangement in cortical thymocytes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 62 papers.
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Who cites it
62 citing papers in PubMed.
- Thymic APC Networks Orchestrate T-Cell Selection: Mechanisms and Therapeutic Opportunities in Immune Disorders.Immunology · 2026Review
- Article
- Epithelial chemokine CCL25 integrates T cell development and intestinal homeostasis.The Journal of experimental medicine · 2026Article
- From Development to Aging: Dynamic Roles of the Thymic Medulla in T Cell Biology.Immunological reviews · 2026Review
- Proteasome alteration between epithelial and hematopoietic cells facilitates positive selection of CD8 T cells.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Morphometric analysis of the thymic epithelial cell network using integrated and orthogonal digital pathology approaches.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Integrin CD103 reveals a distinct developmental pathway of autoreactive thymocytes in TCR transgenic mice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Deconstructing the Thymic Microenvironment Through Genesis to Senescence.Immunological reviews · 2025Review
- The Thymus as a Mirror of the Body's Gene Expression.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2025Review
- Generation and repair of thymic epithelial cells.The Journal of experimental medicine · 2024Review
- Preparation of Single-cell Suspension of Mouse Thymic Epithelial Cells and Staining of Intracellular Molecules for Flow Cytometric Analysis.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2024Article
- Autophagy and proteasomes in thymic epithelial cells: essential bulk protein degradation systems for immune homeostasis maintenance.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Review
- Intravital two-photon microscopy of the native mouse thymus.PloS one · 2024Article
- Aire drives steroid hormone biosynthesis by medullary thymic epithelial cells.Science immunology · 2023Article
- Large-Scale Isolation of Mouse Thymic Epithelial Cells.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Revelations in Thymic Epithelial Cell Biology and Heterogeneity from Single-Cell RNA Sequencing and Lineage Tracing Methodologies.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Mesenchymal stromal cells in the thymus.Inflammation and regeneration · 2022Review
- Single-cell analyses reveal early thymic progenitors and pre-B cells in zebrafish.The Journal of experimental medicine · 2022Article
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2 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Distinct subsets of thymic epithelial cells (TECs) support T-cell development and selection. Isolated TECs contain multicellular complexes that enclose many viable thymocytes. However, the functions of those TECs, termed thymic nurse cells (TNCs), are unclear and the idea that TNCs are present in vivo is questioned. Here, we show that TNCs represent a fraction of cortical (c)TECs that are defined by the expression of thymoproteasomes. Intravital imaging revealed TNCs in the thymic cortex in situ, whereas TNCs were detected neither during embryogenesis nor in the postnatal thymuses of various "positive-selector" T-cell receptor (TCR)-transgenic mice, indicating that TNCs are not essential for T-cell differentiation, including positive selection. Rather, cells within TNCs were enriched for long-lived CD4(+)CD8(+) thymocytes that underwent secondary TCR-Vα rearrangement. Thus, TNC complexes are formed in vivo by persistent cTEC-thymocyte interactions that then provide a microenvironment that optimizes T-cell selection through secondary TCR rearrangement.
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