T cell development in the thymus is a highly regulated process to generate a repertoire of T cells diverse enough to recognise any potential pathogen that the might body encounter. A by-product of this are T cells that can recognize self-antigen. If allowed to circulate through the body, such self-reactive T cells may cause autoimmunity and tissue damage. As such, a critical checkpoint in T cell development is the purging of potentially self-reactive T cells before they fully mature. Thymic medullary epithelial cells are known to play an important role in this negative selection by expressing self-antigens that are tested against developing thymocytes. However, we recently discovered a novel cell type that also expresses self-antigen in the thymus, and these may also be important for the negative selection of thymocytes. The goal of this project is to characterise this novel population in mice using flow cytometry. Questions to be address include: 1) When do these cells first appear in life? 2) Are they maintained throughout life? 3) Are perturbations in this population associated with autoimmunity? This new thymic population may therefore have important implications for our understanding of autoimmune disease.
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