PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Marcin L Pekalski
AU  - Arcadio Rubio García
AU  - Ricardo C Ferreira
AU  - Daniel B Rainbow
AU  - Deborah J Smyth
AU  - Meghavi Mashar
AU  - Jane Brady
AU  - Natalia Savinykh
AU  - Xaquin Castro Dopico
AU  - Sumiyya Mahmood
AU  - Simon Duley
AU  - Helen E Stevens
AU  - Neil M Walker
AU  - Antony J Cutler
AU  - Frank Waldron-Lynch
AU  - David B Dunger
AU  - Claire Shannon-Lowe
AU  - Alasdair J Coles
AU  - Joanne L Jones
AU  - Chris Wallace
AU  - John A Todd
AU  - Linda S Wicker
TI  - Recent thymic emigrants produce antimicrobial IL-8, express complement receptors and are precursors of a tissue-homing Th8 lineage of memory cells
AID  - 10.1101/059535
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 059535
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/12/059535.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/12/059535.full
AB  - The adaptive immune system utilizes multiple mechanisms linked to innate immune cell functions to respond appropriately to pathogens and commensals. Here we discover further aspects of this connectivity by demonstrating that naïve T cells as they emerge from the thymus (recent thymic emigrants, RTEs) express complement receptors (CR1 and CR2), the bacterial pathogen recognition receptor TLR1 and an enzyme that deactivates bacterial lipopolysaccharide (AOAH) and following activation secrete the anti-microbial cytokine IL-8. CR2+ naïve T cells also express a selection of genes associated with tissue migration, consistent with the hypothesis that following emigration from the thymus RTEs seed peripheral compartments where some pursue their anti-microbial potential by becoming IL-8-producing CR2+ memory cells while others undergo homeostatic expansion. CR2+ naïve and memory cells are abundant in children but decrease with age, coinciding with the involution of the thymus. The ability of CR2, which is also a receptor for Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), to identify recent thymic emigrants will facilitate assessment of thymic function during aging and aid investigations of multiple clinical areas including the occurrence of T cell lymphomas caused by EBV.