| First Author | Kernfeld EM | Year | 2018 |
| Journal | Immunity | Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 6 | Pages | 1258-1270.e6 |
| PubMed ID | 29884461 | Mgi Jnum | J:269531 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:6269019 | Doi | 10.1016/j.immuni.2018.04.015 |
| Citation | Kernfeld EM, et al. (2018) A Single-Cell Transcriptomic Atlas of Thymus Organogenesis Resolves Cell Types and Developmental Maturation. Immunity 48(6):1258-1270.e6 |
| abstractText | Thymus development is critical to the adaptive immune system, yet a comprehensive transcriptional framework capturing thymus organogenesis at single-cell resolution is still needed. We applied single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to capture 8 days of thymus development, perturbations of T cell receptor rearrangement, and in vitro organ cultures, producing profiles of 24,279 cells. We resolved transcriptional heterogeneity of developing lymphocytes, and genetic perturbation confirmed T cell identity of conventional and non-conventional lymphocytes. We characterized maturation dynamics of thymic epithelial cells in vivo, classified cell maturation state in a thymic organ culture, and revealed the intrinsic capacity of thymic epithelium to preserve transcriptional regularity despite exposure to exogenous retinoic acid. Finally, by integrating the cell atlas with human genome-wide association study (GWAS) data and autoimmune-disease-related genes, we implicated embryonic thymus-resident cells as possible participants in autoimmune disease etiologies. This resource provides a single-cell transcriptional framework for biological discovery and molecular analysis of thymus organogenesis. |
