Abstract
Deciphering Thymic Development
Highlights
Follow up experiments with the Michael Steinmetz lab transferring TCR alfa and beta genes from one T cell clone to another allowed us to unequivocally conclude that the MHC-restricted specificity was encoded by a single receptor long before crystallographic studies reached the same conclusion [5]. This surprised some molecular biologists somewhat who thought that the cloning of the TCR put an end to the mysteries of the immune system. This lead automatically to the step, the construction of TCR transgenic mice, to analyze the selection of T cells according to their specificity
I have to tell a little tale that characterizes scientists: it was Michael Steinmetz, who had previously spoken to Fritz Melchers, who asked at the Reisensburg in the South of Germany whether there would be any interest in generating TCR transgenic mice
Recently could we address this problem and reported deletion of CD4+8+ thymocytes in the absence of TCR editing [7]. This ended a long story on the deletion of autoaggressive cells at a certain stage of development, something that had not been addressed in mice expressing superantigen specific receptors, which somewhat compromised our transgenic approach since they were conducted later and yielded results earlier albeit with the limitation that the conclusions had to be restricted to superantigens [8] whereas we dealt with conventional antigens for T cells
Summary
Follow up experiments with the Michael Steinmetz lab transferring TCR alfa and beta genes from one T cell clone to another allowed us to unequivocally conclude that the MHC-restricted specificity was encoded by a single receptor long before crystallographic studies reached the same conclusion [5]. This lead automatically to the step, the construction of TCR transgenic mice, to analyze the selection of T cells according to their specificity.
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