Immunity
Volume 28, Issue 6, 13 June 2008, Pages 870-880
Journal home page for Immunity

Article
Two Functional Subsets of FOXP3+ Regulatory T Cells in Human Thymus and Periphery

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2008.03.018Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Summary

Previous studies suggest that thymus produces a homogenous population of natural regulatory T (Treg) cells that express a transcriptional factor FOXP3 and control autoimmunity through a cell-contact-dependent mechanism. We found two subsets of FOXP3+ natural Treg cells defined by the expression of the costimulatory molecule ICOS in the human thymus and periphery. Whereas the ICOS+FOXP3+ Treg cells used interleukin-10 to suppress dendritic cell function and transforming growth factor (TGF)-β to suppress T cell function, the ICOSFOXP3+ Treg cells used TGF-β only. The survival and proliferation of the two subsets of Treg cells were differentially regulated by signaling through ICOS or CD28, respectively. We suggest that the selection of natural Treg cells in thymus is coupled with Treg cell differentiation into two subsets imprinted with different cytokine expression potentials and use both cell-contact-dependent and independent mechanisms for immunosuppression in periphery.

CELLIMMUNO

Cited by (0)

2

Present address: Department of Internal Medicine, Kansai Medical University, 10-15 Fumizonocho, Moriguchi-city, Osaka 570-8506, Japan

3

These authors contributed equally to this work