ArticleCell and tissue research2014
Cholinergic epithelial cell with chemosensory traits in murine thymic medulla.
Article in Cell and tissue research, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gastrointestinal tuft cells: Recent insights and next questions.Science immunology · 2026Review
- Aging disrupts sympathetic innervation of the thymus.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Unbiased recording and identification of thymic cellular interactomes using synthetic Notch receptors.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Physiological functions and pharmacological targeting of transient receptor potential channels.Pharmacological reviews · 2025Review
- Thymic Mimetic Cells: Evolutionarily Ancient Mirrors of the Periphery.Immunological reviews · 2025Review
- Cross-species analyses of thymic mimetic cells reveal evolutionarily ancient origins and both conserved and species-specific elements.Immunity · 2025Article
- Neural regulation of the thymus: past, current, and future perspectives.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Review
- Thymic Mimetic Cells: Ontogeny as Immunology.Annual review of cell and developmental biology · 2024Review
- Tuft cell acetylcholine is released into the gut lumen to promote anti-helminth immunity.Immunity · 2024Article
- Immune tolerance and the prevention of autoimmune diseases essentially depend on thymic tissue homeostasis.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Review
- Thymic tuft cells: potential "regulators" of non-mucosal tissue development and immune response.Immunologic research · 2023Review
- Cellular mechanisms and molecular pathways linking bitter taste receptor signalling to cardiac inflammation, oxidative stress, arrhythmia and contractile dysfunction in heart diseases.Inflammopharmacology · 2023Review
- Tuft Cells: Context- and Tissue-Specific Programming for a Conserved Cell Lineage.Annual review of pathology · 2023Review
- Ehf and Fezf2 regulate late medullary thymic epithelial cell and thymic tuft cell development.Frontiers in immunology · 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
- Thymic mimetic cells: tolerogenic masqueraders.Trends in immunology · 2022Review
- Tuft Cells Are Present in Submandibular Glands Across Species.The journal of histochemistry and cytochemistry : official journal of the Histochemistry Society · 2022Article
- Article
- Sirt6-mediated epigenetic modification of DNA accessibility is essential for Pou2f3-induced thymic tuft cell development.Communications biology · 2022Article
- "Every cell is an immune cell; contributions of non-hematopoietic cells to anti-helminth immunity".Mucosal immunology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Specialized epithelial cells with a tuft of apical microvilli ("brush cells") sense luminal content and initiate protective reflexes in response to potentially harmful substances. They utilize the canonical taste transduction cascade to detect "bitter" substances such as bacterial quorum-sensing molecules. In the respiratory tract, most of these cells are cholinergic and are approached by cholinoceptive sensory nerve fibers. Utilizing two different reporter mouse strains for the expression of choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), we observed intense labeling of a subset of thymic medullary cells. ChAT expression was confirmed by in situ hybridization. These cells showed expression of villin, a brush cell marker protein, and ultrastructurally exhibited lateral microvilli. They did not express neuroendocrine (chromogranin A, PGP9.5) or thymocyte (CD3) markers but rather thymic epithelial (CK8, CK18) markers and were immunoreactive for components of the taste transduction cascade such as Gα-gustducin, transient receptor potential melastatin-like subtype 5 channel (TRPM5), and phospholipase Cβ2. Reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction confirmed the expression of Gα-gustducin, TRPM5, and phospholipase Cβ2. Thymic "cholinergic chemosensory cells" were often in direct contact with medullary epithelial cells expressing the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit α3. These cells have recently been identified as terminally differentiated epithelial cells (Hassall's corpuscle-like structures in mice). Contacts with nerve fibers (identified by PGP9.5 and CGRP antibodies), however, were not observed. Our data identify, in the thymus, a previously unrecognized presumptive chemosensitive cell that probably utilizes acetylcholine for paracrine signaling. This cell might participate in intrathymic infection-sensing mechanisms.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.