Expression data from thymic non-hematopoietic stromal cells after damage

The thymus is extremely sensitive to damage but also has a remarkable ability to repair itself. However, the mechanisms underlying this endogenous regeneration remain poorly understood and this capacity diminishes considerably with age. To identify alternate regeneration pathways in the thymus, we performed an unbiased transcriptome analysis of the non-hematopoietic (CD45-) stromal cell compartment of the thymus, which is less sensitive to thymic damage compared to the CD45+ hematopoietic compartment. Concentrating on a model of thymic damage caused by a sublethal dose of total body irradiation (SL-TBI), where after an initial depletion of thymic cellularity with regeneration initiated after a nadir between days 3-4 and complete recovery by day 42, we found significant upregulation at both days 4 and 7 of several genes known to be involved in thymic function. Thymic non-hematopoietic stromal cells were isolated using CD45 MACS cell depletion. Microarray analysis was performed on an Affymetrix MOE 430 2.0 platform in triplicate in untreated mice, and day 4 and day 7 after SL-TBI.