A glimpse of natural selection of long-lived T cell clones in healthy life

We designed a lineage tracing method to label a wave of T cells produced in the thymus of young. TCR repertoire analysis revealed that the lineage-tracked CD4 memory-like T cells and T regulatory cells exhibited age-dependent enrichment of shared clonotypes, indicating that antigen matched T regulatory cells are involved in maintaining the tolerant status of long-lived T cell clones. Furthermore, these shared clonotypes were found across different mice maintained in the same housing condition mice. Overall design: Examination of antigen-specificity of aging-tracking T-cell subtype.