Sunday, October 11, 2009

T cells and B cells

Today in my immunology "class" I was approached with a conflicting information regarding the progenitor(s) of B-cells and T-cells. For those of you who are familiar with hematopoiesis, some textbooks say that B-cells and T-cells are derived from common lymphoid progenitor (CLP); however, upon further inquiry you've no doubt realized that it is more complicated than that. For instance, the jury is still out, so to speak, regarding the true progenitor of T-cells. An article in Nature Immunology by E. Montecino-Rodriguez titled "To T or not to T: reassessing the common lymphoid progenitor" states that T-cells may be derived from early T lineage progenitor rather than CLP.
While posting the above on Moodle as part of my immunology class's assignment, I thought, "Hmmm...is this fact really important or pertinent to nursing?" and all I could came up with was, "I think so," for although T-cells and B-cells make up our adaptive immune system, I don't know if knowing whether or not they come from a different progenitor will affect the way I care for my patients. This thinking, though, is a work in progress for I still have a whole quarter of immunology, infectious disease, and epidemiology ahead of me!

1 Comments:

Blogger Joachim Voss said...

Thanks for sharing and yes this is important to know. Maybe you can find out why and let us know in a future post!

October 28, 2009 at 3:31 PM  

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