Towards a unified model of naive T cell dynamics across the lifespan

  1. Sanket Rane
  2. Thea Hogan
  3. Edward Lee
  4. Benedict Seddon  Is a corresponding author
  5. Andrew J Yates  Is a corresponding author
  1. Columbia University, United States
  2. University College London, United Kingdom
  3. Yale University, United States

Abstract

Naive CD4 and CD8 T cells are cornerstones of adaptive immunity, but the dynamics of their establishment early in life and how their kinetics change as they mature following release from the thymus are poorly understood. Further, due to the diverse signals implicated in naive T cell survival, it has been a long-held and conceptually attractive view that they are sustained by active homeostatic control as thymic activity wanes. Here we employ multiple experimental systems to identify a unified model of naive CD4 and CD8 T cell population dynamics in mice, across their lifespan. We infer that both subsets divide rarely and progressively increase their survival capacity with cell age. Strikingly, this simple model is able to describe naive CD4 T cell dynamics throughout life. In contrast, we find that newly generated naive CD8 T cells are lost more rapidly during the first 3-4 weeks of life, likely due to increased recruitment into memory. We find no evidence for elevated division rates in neonates, or for feedback regulation of naive T cell numbers at any age. We show how confronting mathematical models with diverse datasets can reveal a quantitative and remarkably simple picture of naive T cell dynamics in mice from birth into old age.

Data availability

All code and data used in this study are available at https://github.com/sanketrane/T_cell_dynamics_birth-death

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Sanket Rane

    Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Thea Hogan

    Institute of Immunity and Transplantation, University College London, London, United Kingdom
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Edward Lee

    Department of Laboratory Medicine, Yale University, Newhaven, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Benedict Seddon

    Institute of Immunity and Transplantation, University College London, London, United Kingdom
    For correspondence
    benedict.seddon@ucl.ac.uk
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4352-3373
  5. Andrew J Yates

    Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University, New York, United States
    For correspondence
    andrew.yates@columbia.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4606-4483

Funding

National Institutes of Health (R01AI093870)

  • Andrew J Yates

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Gabrielle T Belz, The University of Queensland, Australia

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All of the animals were handled according to UK home office regulations (licence PPL PP2330953) and institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols at University College London

Version history

  1. Preprint posted: January 8, 2022 (view preprint)
  2. Received: February 25, 2022
  3. Accepted: June 8, 2022
  4. Accepted Manuscript published: June 9, 2022 (version 1)
  5. Accepted Manuscript updated: June 10, 2022 (version 2)
  6. Version of Record published: August 3, 2022 (version 3)

Copyright

© 2022, Rane et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 1,557
    Page views
  • 401
    Downloads
  • 8
    Citations

Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, PubMed Central, Scopus.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Sanket Rane
  2. Thea Hogan
  3. Edward Lee
  4. Benedict Seddon
  5. Andrew J Yates
(2022)
Towards a unified model of naive T cell dynamics across the lifespan
eLife 11:e78168.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78168

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78168

Further reading

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    Qianmu Yuan, Chong Tian, Yuedong Yang
    Tools and Resources

    Revealing protein binding sites with other molecules, such as nucleic acids, peptides, or small ligands, sheds light on disease mechanism elucidation and novel drug design. With the explosive growth of proteins in sequence databases, how to accurately and efficiently identify these binding sites from sequences becomes essential. However, current methods mostly rely on expensive multiple sequence alignments or experimental protein structures, limiting their genome-scale applications. Besides, these methods haven’t fully explored the geometry of the protein structures. Here, we propose GPSite, a multi-task network for simultaneously predicting binding residues of DNA, RNA, peptide, protein, ATP, HEM, and metal ions on proteins. GPSite was trained on informative sequence embeddings and predicted structures from protein language models, while comprehensively extracting residual and relational geometric contexts in an end-to-end manner. Experiments demonstrate that GPSite substantially surpasses state-of-the-art sequence-based and structure-based approaches on various benchmark datasets, even when the structures are not well-predicted. The low computational cost of GPSite enables rapid genome-scale binding residue annotations for over 568,000 sequences, providing opportunities to unveil unexplored associations of binding sites with molecular functions, biological processes, and genetic variants. The GPSite webserver and annotation database can be freely accessed at https://bio-web1.nscc-gz.cn/app/GPSite.

    1. Cell Biology
    2. Computational and Systems Biology
    Thomas Grandits, Christoph M Augustin ... Alexander Jung
    Research Article

    Computer models of the human ventricular cardiomyocyte action potential (AP) have reached a level of detail and maturity that has led to an increasing number of applications in the pharmaceutical sector. However, interfacing the models with experimental data can become a significant computational burden. To mitigate the computational burden, the present study introduces a neural network (NN) that emulates the AP for given maximum conductances of selected ion channels, pumps, and exchangers. Its applicability in pharmacological studies was tested on synthetic and experimental data. The NN emulator potentially enables massive speed-ups compared to regular simulations and the forward problem (find drugged AP for pharmacological parameters defined as scaling factors of control maximum conductances) on synthetic data could be solved with average root-mean-square errors (RMSE) of 0.47 mV in normal APs and of 14.5 mV in abnormal APs exhibiting early afterdepolarizations (72.5% of the emulated APs were alining with the abnormality, and the substantial majority of the remaining APs demonstrated pronounced proximity). This demonstrates not only very fast and mostly very accurate AP emulations but also the capability of accounting for discontinuities, a major advantage over existing emulation strategies. Furthermore, the inverse problem (find pharmacological parameters for control and drugged APs through optimization) on synthetic data could be solved with high accuracy shown by a maximum RMSE of 0.22 in the estimated pharmacological parameters. However, notable mismatches were observed between pharmacological parameters estimated from experimental data and distributions obtained from the Comprehensive in vitro Proarrhythmia Assay initiative. This reveals larger inaccuracies which can be attributed particularly to the fact that small tissue preparations were studied while the emulator was trained on single cardiomyocyte data. Overall, our study highlights the potential of NN emulators as powerful tool for an increased efficiency in future quantitative systems pharmacology studies.