It has long been recognized that the T-cell compartment has more CD4 helper than CD8 cytotoxic T cells, and this is most evident looking at T-cell development in the thymus. However, it remains unknown how thymocyte development so favors CD4 lineage development. To identify the basis of this asymmetry, we analyzed development of synchronized cohorts of thymocytes in vivo and estimated rates of thymocyte death and differentiation throughout development, inferring lineage-specific efficiencies of selection. Our analysis suggested that roughly equal numbers of cells of each lineage enter selection and found that, overall, a remarkable ∼75% of cells that start selection fail to complete the process. Importantly it revealed that class I-restricted thymocytes are specifically susceptible to apoptosis at the earliest stage of selection. The importance of differential apoptosis was confirmed by placing thymocytes under apoptotic stress, resulting in preferential death of class I-restricted thymocytes. Thus, asymmetric death during selection is the key determinant of the CD4:CD8 ratio in which T cells are generated by thymopoiesis.
CD4 T cells | CD8 T cellsD evelopment of CD4 and CD8 lineage cells from common thymic precursors is one of the most fundamental developmental processes in the adaptive immune system. The predominance of CD4 over CD8 T-cell populations in the periphery has been apparent since helper and cytotoxic T cells were first delineated more than 30 y ago (1), but the cause of this signature bias has remained obscure. A key contribution arises from the ratio in which CD4 and CD8 lineage T cells are generated by the thymus. Single-positive (SP) thymocytes exist in the thymus at ∼4:1, a ratio that is highly conserved across mouse strains and other species, suggesting that the developmental mechanisms involved are fundamental to the processes that give rise to mature T cells in the thymus. During thymocyte development, T-cell antigen receptor (TCR) genes undergo somatic rearrangements to generate a broad repertoire of TCR structures. Negative and positive selection of thymocytes results in the deletion of autoreactive thymocytes and ensures that class I and class II MHC reactivity is correlated with CD8 and CD4 lineage specification. The molecular mechanisms underpinning these processes are increasingly well understood. Although survival of thymocytes is regulated by expression of Bcl2 family members, up-regulation of the BH3-only family member Bim has been specifically implicated as a key event in negative selection of thymocytes (2). During positive selection, class II recognition is thought to induce strong persistent signaling that results in a cascade of transcriptional regulation by factors such as GATA3 and T-helper-inducing POZ/Krüppel-like factor, which results in fixation of cells to the CD4 lineage (3, 4). In contrast, weaker or transient signaling by class I MHC results in the cytokine-dependent induction of a Runx3-mediated transcriptional program that induces CD8 lineage commitment (5-8).Despit...