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Lymphocyte commitment and Ikaros transcription factors

T lymphocytes like all blood cells are progenies of a single multipotent hematopoietic stem cell (HSC). The existence of HSCs was proven by Till and McCulloch in 1961 when bone marrow cells injected into irradiated mice formed multilineage colonies in their spleens. These cells were called colony forming units (CFU-S) and they have potential for self-renewal and differentiation into all types of blood cells(Till and McCulloch 1961, Wu et al. 1968). For lymphocyte development HSCs migrate from the bone marrow, differentiate in the thymus into immunocompetent cells and seed the peripheral lymphatic organs. This process occurs during fetal development (for review see (Godin and Cumano 2002), but also during the adult life of an individual since T lymphocytes have to be continuously replenished. Transplantation experiments proved that thirty hematopoietic stem cells are sufficient to save 50 percent of lethally irradiated mice, and to reconstitute all blood cell types in vivo (Spangrude et al. 1988). Because it is extremely important to produce immunocompetent T cells the process of their maturation and development is strictly regulated and is succumb to very strict check points at several stages of differentiation. In this context we’ll discuss Ikaros family transcription factors as major regulators of T lymphocyte development.

Lymphocytes ; Ikaros transcription factors ; development ; stem cells

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