Teams of prof. Taghon & prof. Yvan Saeys play crucial role in the development of the first Cell Atlas for the human Thymus

As a vital organ for the establishment of the immune system, the thymus supports the maturation of T cells, essential white blood cells that help to protect us from infections and tumor cells. How exactly these T cells develop in the thymus however, remained unclear.

In a collaboration with The Wellcome Sanger Institute (UK) and Newcastle University (UK), the teams of CRIG group leaders prof. Tom Taghon and prof. Yvan Saeys (both Ghent University, VIB & CRIG) have now for the first time composed a complete map of the cells in the developing human thymus, in their ‘Cell Atlas for the human Thymus’, a single-cell transcriptomic atlas comprising more than 250 000 cells. This novel approach with single cell resolution allowed them to identify more than 50 different cell states in the human thymus which dynamically change in abundance during life.

“The thymus atlas project will provide a great resource for the community,” says Tom Taghon, a co-senior author on the study. "We now have a very detailed understanding of how T cells are generated in healthy tissue and this helps us understand how immunity develops. Since we now know which genes need to be activated to generate T cells, we can exploit this information to engineer T cells with, for instance, a desired specificity to target tumor cells." Moreover, the atlas will help scientists understand diseases that affect T cell development, such as severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) and T cell leukemia.

Read more via this link.

The study was recently published in the renowned journal 'Science' and is accessible via this link.