The thymus is the organ in which T cell development occurs. Its relative and absolute size decreases with age when it becomes successively replaced by fat although thymic activity can still be detected in the old age. Its importance for the immune response was demonstrated in the early 1960s1.
The T cell repertoire is shaped through the interaction of T cell receptors with peptide-MHC complexes on different kinds of thymic APC, which provide survival or death cues to developing T cells, resulting in a functional and largely self-tolerant T cell repertoire2.
Approximately 98% of the cells in ....