the late sexual maturity in sturgeon and the absence of morphological differences between males and females makes sex discrimination difficult. identification of sex at an early life stage is of high interest in caviar production because it allows efficient selection of females. in this study, the genome of 10 mature male and 10 mature female specimens of persian sturgeon (acipenser persicus...

Postnatal T cell development depends on continuous colonization of the thymus by BM-derived T lineage progenitors. Both quantitative parameters and the mechanisms of thymus seeding remain poorly understood. Here, we determined the number of dedicated thymus-seeding progenitor niches (TSPNs) capable of supporting productive T cell development, turnover rates of niche occupancy, and feedback mech...

We compared the cytotoxic activities of thymus-dependent and thymus-independent CD8(+) T cells. Thymus-dependent CD8(+) T cells, which are foreign antigen specific, acquired cytotoxic activity to tumor cells with a basal dose of the antigen peptides and to hybridoma cells expressing anti-TCR mAb only after differentiation into effector cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL). In contrast, thymus-independ...

In the present work we analyze by reverse transcription, polymerase chain reaction, cDNA cloning, and sequence analysis the expression of membrane melatonin receptors in rat thymus and spleen. Results show, for the first time, that the melatonin receptor mRNA is expressed in both the thymus and spleen. Moreover, the melatonin receptor mRNA was expressed in all the lymphocyte subpopulations (CD4...

Light microscopic and ultrastructural studies of thymus in wall lizard showed remarkable season dependent structural changes. In winter, the thymus was involuted and its cortico-medullary differentiation was not distinct. Thymocytes were sparsely distributed. The epithelial cells exhibited atrophic features such as an appreciable decrease in the nuclear-cytoplasmic ratio and accordingly reducti...

We developed a novel experimental strategy to study T cell regeneration after bone marrow transplantation. We assessed the fraction of competent precursors required to repopulate the thymus and quantified the relationship between the size of the different T cell compartments during T cell maturation in the thymus. The contribution of the thymus to the establishment and maintenance of the periph...

We found that c-kit-positive, lineage marker-negative, Thy-1lo cells are present in both bone marrow and thymus ("BM c-kit" and "thymus c-kit" cells). Although the two cell types are phenotypically similar, only BM c-kit cells showed the potential to form colonies in vitro as well as in vivo. However, both of them revealed extensive growth and differentiation potential to T cells after direct t...