T-Cell Development: Studies In Vivo and in Organ Culture

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The recent discovery of the T-cell receptor has generated enormous interest in T-cell development and function. In an effort to study T-cell differentiation two cell types have been derived which appear to represent two stages of early thymocyte development: 1) a cell type that arises spontaneously under certain conditions in tissue culture, and 2) an immature T-cell line resulting from the Abelson virus (A-MuLV) infection of 13-14 day old thymocytes from C57Bl/6 mice. In this study it is proposed to characterize in detail both cell lines, and to employ techniques developed in this laboratory to infect early thymocytes with wild type A-MuLV to obtain T-cell lines stably transformed with a temperature sensitive mutant of Abelson virus (ts-A-MuLV). Immature thymocytes transformed with ts-A-MuLV and shifted to the non-permissive temperature for v-abl (the Abelson virus oncogene product) expression, under conditions suitable for T-cell differentiation, may retain the capacity to proceed along the normal pathway of T-cell differentiation. This system may produce important information on the differentiation of T-cells previously unobtainable from T-cell lines "frozen" in one stage of development.