Peripheral T cells in the thymus: have they just lost their way or do they do something?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In young adult mice, the thymus produces about a million newly formed T cells every day that colonize peripheral lymphoid tissues. Mostly regarded as a primary lymphoid organ only, the relationship between the thymus and peripheral lymphoid organs is considered unidirectional. However, this perception has been challenged by reports showing that peripheral lymphocytes, mostly T cells, can migrate back into the thymus. The presence of recirculating T cells in the thymus is rather incongruous and raises the question: is the presence of 'peripheral' T cells in the thymus superfluous or do these cells fulfill some relevant physiologic functions? There is now evidence that cells of the hematopoietic lineage, including T cells, can play an active role during thymocyte selection, a role generally considered the exclusive property of thymic epithelial cells and dendritic cells. Although, on a per cell basis, peripheral T cells in the thymus may be less efficient than thymus epithelial cells or dendritic cells at thymocyte positive and negative selection, they may nevertheless contribute to selection by influencing the selectable TCR repertoire and post-selection T cell functionality. Here, peripheral lymphocytes re-entering the thymus may be envisioned as Trojan horses as these cells may introduce antigens necessary for both positive and negative selection of T cells.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".