Publicação
Homeostasis of the T cell memory compartment
| Resumo: | In spite of daily T cell production in the thymus associated with intensive proliferation and differentiation of specific T cells upon each antigenic stimulation, peripheral T cells numbers are kept constant. This equilibrium is called homeostasis and subjacent to this process is the concept of competition for limiting resources. Each newly produced T cell has to compete with other new and/or resident peripheral T cell to survive. The periphery comprises two main compartments, the naive and activated/memory T cell pools, for each CD8+ and CD4+ subsets. These compartments are thought to have independent homeostatic regulation, although they share some common resources. The purpose of this thesis is to study the homeostasis of T cells, with a particular interest for the memory subsets, either at steady state or after disruption of this equilibrium upon infection. In the first part of the work, we showed that T cells belonging to different peripheral compartments could compete with each other for p-MHC (peptide-MHC complexes), even if they present a distinct T cell receptor. Moreover, we observed that recognition of p-MHC overlaps not only between different T cell populations but also between T cells ongoing different homeostatic mechanisms such as survival, LDP or accumulation after thymic emigration. In the second part of the study, we show again a modulation of T cell repertoire due to the displacement of memory T cells by BM-derived T cells presenting degenerate TCR. Besides this steady state attrition termed natural attrition , we proposed to study the fate of memory T cells upon Salmonella thymimurium infection. Preliminary data showed that both non-specific CD4+ and CD8+ memory T cells were depleted upon this infection and that type I IFN were not directly implicated in this death. More work remains to be performed to precisely define the targets and mechanism of this attrition. |
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| Autores principais: | Leitão, Catarina de Carvalho Soares Dinis, 1980- |
| Assunto: | Biologia celular Teses de doutoramento |
| Ano: | 2008 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | tese de doutoramento |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | In spite of daily T cell production in the thymus associated with intensive proliferation and differentiation of specific T cells upon each antigenic stimulation, peripheral T cells numbers are kept constant. This equilibrium is called homeostasis and subjacent to this process is the concept of competition for limiting resources. Each newly produced T cell has to compete with other new and/or resident peripheral T cell to survive. The periphery comprises two main compartments, the naive and activated/memory T cell pools, for each CD8+ and CD4+ subsets. These compartments are thought to have independent homeostatic regulation, although they share some common resources. The purpose of this thesis is to study the homeostasis of T cells, with a particular interest for the memory subsets, either at steady state or after disruption of this equilibrium upon infection. In the first part of the work, we showed that T cells belonging to different peripheral compartments could compete with each other for p-MHC (peptide-MHC complexes), even if they present a distinct T cell receptor. Moreover, we observed that recognition of p-MHC overlaps not only between different T cell populations but also between T cells ongoing different homeostatic mechanisms such as survival, LDP or accumulation after thymic emigration. In the second part of the study, we show again a modulation of T cell repertoire due to the displacement of memory T cells by BM-derived T cells presenting degenerate TCR. Besides this steady state attrition termed natural attrition , we proposed to study the fate of memory T cells upon Salmonella thymimurium infection. Preliminary data showed that both non-specific CD4+ and CD8+ memory T cells were depleted upon this infection and that type I IFN were not directly implicated in this death. More work remains to be performed to precisely define the targets and mechanism of this attrition. |
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