Analysis and varification on self-and nonself-recognition mechanism in progenitor like thymic epithelila cell lines

胸腺上皮细胞上的自体肽和MHC分子组成的复合体对胸腺内T细胞的发育起着重要的作用。然而，这类复合体的形成和表达的分子机制还不是很清楚。首先，通过单层培养建立的胸腺上皮细胞系几乎不表达与T细胞发育有关的功能分子FOXN1。反过来，在从胎儿胸腺制备的上皮细胞组分聚集培养时，这些上皮细胞表达几乎与新鲜分离的上皮细胞相同的FOXN1表达水平。这些上皮细胞以及FOXN1诱导的上皮细胞株几乎没有重建胸腺微环境的能力。在未来，我将继续进行这两个计划，建立稳定表达FOXN1的胸腺上皮细胞系，并研究这些细胞系中MHC复合体的形成和表达机制。

The complexes consisting of self-peptides plus MHC molecules on thymic epithelial cells play important roles for intrathymic T dell-development. However, the molecular mechanisms for formation and expression of such complexes are not understood well. Firstly, it was revealed that thymic epithelial cell lines established by monolayer culture hardly expressed FoxN1, one of functional molecules for T cell-development. In turn, upon aggregation culture of an epithelial cell-fraction prepared from fetal thymus, the epithelial cells expressed the almost same FoxN1-expression level as that in freshly isolated epithelial cells. Those epithelial cells as well as the FoxN1-inducible epithelial cell lines hardly had an ability to re-construct thymic microenvironment. In future, I am going to proceed with the two plans, the establishment of thymic epithelial cell lines stably expressing FoxN1 and the investigation for formation and expression mechanisms of the MHC complexes in these cell lines.