ArticleFrontiers in immunology2023
Thymic epithelial cell fate and potency in early organogenesis assessed by single cell transcriptional and functional analysis.
Article in Frontiers in immunology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Distinct Molecular Pathways Driving Thymic and Pulmonary Neuroendocrine Neoplasms: Organ of Origin Defines Molecular Identity and Yields CD44 as a Marker of Pulmonary Neuroendocrine Tumors.Endocrine pathology · 2026Article
- Reduced dosage of Kmt2d modifies Tbx1 haploinsufficiency toward phenotypes of 22q11.2DS.JCI insight · 2026Article
- The Thymus Regeneration Paradox: The Search for Stemness in an Involuting Organ.Immunological reviews · 2026Review
- Combinatory differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells generates functional thymic epithelium driving dendritic cell and CD4/CD8 T cell development.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Minoxidil restores thymic growth in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome by limiting Sox9Journal of human immunity · 2025Article
- An iPSC-based in vitro model recapitulates human thymic epithelial development and multi-lineage specification.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Sterile production of interferons in the thymus.Journal of immunology (Baltimore, Md. : 1950) · 2025Review
- Perspectives on the Parathyroid-Thymus Interconnection-A Literature Review.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Thymus research in relation to myasthenia gravis: a new perspective on cell subpopulations and future directions.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Review
- Thymus Ontogeny and Development.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2025Review
- Generation and repair of thymic epithelial cells.The Journal of experimental medicine · 2024Review
- Age-related epithelial defects limit thymic function and regeneration.Nature immunology · 2024Article
- The Proteostasis of Thymic Stromal Cells in Health and Diseases.The protein journal · 2024Review
- Assembling the thymus medulla: Development and function of epithelial cell heterogeneity.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2024Article
- Transcriptomic profiling of thymic dysregulation and viral tropism after neonatal roseolovirus infection.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
During development, cortical (c) and medullary (m) thymic epithelial cells (TEC) arise from the third pharyngeal pouch endoderm. Current models suggest that within the thymic primordium most TEC exist in a bipotent/common thymic epithelial progenitor cell (TEPC) state able to generate both cTEC and mTEC, at least until embryonic day 12.5 (E12.5) in the mouse. This view, however, is challenged by recent transcriptomics and genetic evidence. We therefore set out to investigate the fate and potency of TEC in the early thymus. Here using single cell (sc) RNAseq we identify a candidate mTEC progenitor population at E12.5, consistent with recent reports. Via lineage-tracing we demonstrate this population as mTEC fate-restricted, validating our bioinformatics prediction. Using potency analyses we also establish that most E11.5 and E12.5 progenitor TEC are cTEC-fated. Finally we show that overnight culture causes most if not all E12.5 cTEC-fated TEPC to acquire functional bipotency, and provide a likely molecular mechanism for this changed differentiation potential. Collectively, our data overturn the widely held view that a common TEPC predominates in the E12.5 thymus, showing instead that sublineage-primed progenitors are present from the earliest stages of thymus organogenesis but that these early fetal TEPC exhibit cell-fate plasticity in response to extrinsic factors. Our data provide a significant advance in the understanding of fetal thymic epithelial development and thus have implications for thymus-related clinical research, in particular research focussed on generating TEC from pluripotent stem cells.
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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.