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An avian foundation for dominant tolerance

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 18, page 601 (2018)Cite this article

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The discovery of regulatory T (Treg) cells has transformed immunology. In the pre-Treg cell era, our concept of immune tolerance was that it largely involved a developmental purge of autoreactivity. Today, we understand that immune tolerance is a dynamic and ongoing process.

Evidence for tolerogenic T cells dates back nearly 50 years. Unfortunately for the field, many of the early insights were tossed away together with the suppressor T cell model in the 1980s, a concept that collapsed under the weight of experimental artifacts. It took the labour of Shimon Sakaguchi and Fiona Powrie in the 1990s to bring Treg cells back into a sceptical field; the concept did not gain full acceptance until landmark publications in 2003 from the labs of Sakaguchi, Alexander Rudensky and Fred Ramsdell that linked forkhead box protein P3 (FOXP3) expression to Treg cell differentiation and function. Here, I would like to highlight a forgotten gem of the 1980s — two studies by Nicole Le Douarin and colleagues.

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References

Original articles

  • Ohki, H. et al. Tolerance induced by thymic epithelial grafts in birds. Science 237, 1032–1035 (1987)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Ohki, H. et al. Implants of quail thymic epithelium generate permanent tolerance in embryonically constructed quail/chick chimeras. Development 104, 619–630 (1988)

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Further reading

  • Le Douarin, N. et al. Evidence for a thymus-dependent form of tolerance that is not based on elimination or anergy of reactive T cells. Immunol. Rev. 149, 35–53 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

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  1. VIB and University of Leuven, Leuven, 3000, Belgium

    Adrian Liston

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  1. Adrian Liston
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Correspondence to Adrian Liston.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Liston, A. An avian foundation for dominant tolerance. Nat Rev Immunol 18, 601 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-018-0053-z

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