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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2013 Sep 21.
Published in final edited form as: Immunity. 2012 Aug 23;37(3):475–486. doi: 10.1016/j.immuni.2012.07.009

Figure 4. A role for TCR affinity in the thymic Treg cell selection “niche”.

Figure 4

(A) Inverse relationship between clonal frequency and Treg cell development. Thymic Treg cell development was assessed in mixed bone marrow chimeras with varying ratios of WT to retrovirally transduced bone marrow. Data shown are the percentage of Foxp3+CD4SP cells versus the clonal frequency in the CD4SP subset for the indicated TCR. Each symbol represents data from an individual recipient from 3–5 independent experiments for each TCR. Data points in the dashed red boxes fall outside of the previously described inverse relationship. (B) Data from the experiment shown in (A) are plotted log-log to illustrate the similar slopes, with differences in the intercept. Note that the points in the red boxes are not shown in this plot. (C) Absolute number of Treg cells from the data shown in (B) are plotted versus clonal frequency. (D) Correlation of Treg cell selection niche size to TCR affinity. The number of Foxp3+ cells was analyzed by linear regression with OVA-reactivity measured by NFAT activation (upper) and tetramer binding (lower) as per Figure 3. Each symbol represents an individual TCR as indicated in the legend.