Regulatory T cells in Skin Facilitate Epithelial Stem Cell Differentiation

By N. Ali, Bahar Zirak, Robert Sanchez Rodriguez, M. Pauli, H. Truong, K. Lai, R. Ahn, K. Corbin, Margaret M. Lowe, T. Scharschmidt and 11 more. Cell, 2017

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The maintenance of tissue homeostasis is critically dependent on the function of tissue-resident immune cells and the differentiation capacity of tissue-resident stem cells (SCs). How immune cells influence the function of SCs is largely unknown. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) in skin preferentially localize to hair follicles (HFs), which house a major subset of skin SCs (HFSCs). Here, we mechanistically dissect the role of Tregs in HF and HFSC biology. Lineage-specific cell depletion revealed that Tregs promote HF regeneration by augmenting HFSC proliferation and differentiation. Transcriptional and phenotypic profiling of Tregs and HFSCs revealed that skin-resident Tregs preferentially express high levels of the Notch ligand family member, Jagged 1 (Jag1). Expression of Jag1 on Tregs facilitated HFSC function and efficient HF regeneration. Taken together, our work demonstrates that Tregs in skin play a major role in HF biology by promoting the function of HFSCs.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Immunology, Urology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90d10215a147509963ac9ffc505d233f90229fc8

Citations in the corpus

• Cellular and molecular mechanisms of skin wound healing (2024, neutral): “T reg cells are abundant in the hair follicles of unwounded skin in mice 188,189 and, after damage, activated T reg cells accumulate at the wound site in large numbers 190,191 .”