@article{6a2344a8d7c749a5a4b9f8088359e726,
title = "Ectopic cervical thymi and no thymic involution until midlife in naked mole rats",
abstract = "Immunosenescence is a hallmark of aging and manifests as increased susceptibility to infection, autoimmunity, and cancer in the elderly. One component of immunosenescence is thymic involution, age-associated shrinkage of the thymus, observed in all vertebrates studied to date. The naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) has become an attractive animal model in aging research due to its extreme longevity and resistance to disease. Here, we show that naked mole rats display no thymic involution up to 11 years of age. Furthermore, we found large ectopic cervical thymi in addition to the canonical thoracic thymus, both being identical in their cell composition. The developmental landscape in naked mole rat thymi revealed overt differences from the murine T-cell compartment, most notably a decrease of CD4+/CD8+ double-positive cells and lower abundance of cytotoxic effector T cells. Our observations suggest that naked mole rats display a delayed immunosenescence. Therapeutic interventions aimed at reversing thymic aging remain limited, underscoring the importance of understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind a sustained immune function in the naked mole rat.",
keywords = "CD4-CD8 Ratio, T-lymphocytes, aging, immunosenescence, lymphopoiesis, naked mole rat, thymus",
author = "Stephan Emmrich and {Tolibzoda Zakusilo}, Frances and Alexandre Trapp and Xuming Zhou and Quanwei Zhang and Irving, {Ellen M.} and Drage, {Michael G.} and Zhengdong Zhang and Gladyshev, {Vadim N.} and Andrei Seluanov and Vera Gorbunova",
note = "Funding Information: Many thanks to Cameron Baker for cellranger preprocessing of scRNA‐Seq data, Michelle Zanche, Jeffrey Malik, and John Ashton for Genomic Research Core support. The authors thank the Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) at the University of Rochester for providing computational resources and technical support and the URMC Flow Core for assistance with sorting and Seahorse. This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health grants to V.G. and A.S., and V.N.G. S.E. is a fellow of HFSP. Funding Information: Many thanks to Cameron Baker for cellranger preprocessing of scRNA-Seq data, Michelle Zanche, Jeffrey Malik, and John Ashton for Genomic Research Core support. The authors thank the Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) at the University of Rochester for providing computational resources and technical support and the URMC Flow Core for assistance with sorting and Seahorse. This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health grants to V.G. and A.S., and V.N.G. S.E. is a fellow of HFSP. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 The Authors. Aging Cell published by Anatomical Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.",
year = "2021",
month = oct,
doi = "10.1111/acel.13477",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "20",
journal = "Aging Cell",
issn = "1474-9718",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "10",
}
