What Is a T Cell?
TCR/CD3 complex, antigen specificity, clonal selection, helper/killer/regulatory programs, and canonical T cell states.
A Brief History of T Cells
From anatomical curiosity to cellular immunity — the experiments and conceptual breakthroughs that built modern T cell biology.
The T Cell Life Cycle as a Story Arc
Birth in the thymus, selection, naive surveillance, activation, effector function, memory formation, and dysfunction.
Where T Cells Live and Move
The spatial logic of immunity — lymphoid organs, recirculation, tissue residency, and how anatomy shapes T cell encounters.
T Cell Nomenclature and Phenotyping: How Not to Get Lost
Markers, surface phenotyping, lineage vs. state vs. function labels, and navigating the naming conventions of T cell biology.
The TCR Repertoire: Diversity as a Survival Strategy
V(D)J recombination, repertoire generation, clonal diversity, and how the immune system builds a receptor library to cover the antigen universe.
T Cells as Information-Processing Systems
Signal integration, decision logic, thresholds, feedback circuits, and how T cells compute responses from noisy inputs.
Experimental Models for T Cell Biology
In vivo and in vitro systems, transgenic models, adoptive transfer, organoids, and the tools that drive T cell discovery.
Clinical Panorama of T Cell–Dominated Biology
Autoimmunity, transplant rejection, immunodeficiency, cancer immunology, and how T cells drive clinical phenotypes across disease.
Safety, Ethics, and Dual–Use Boundaries in Engineered T Cell Therapies
Ethical frameworks, biosafety considerations, dual-use risks, regulatory landscapes, and responsible innovation in T cell engineering.
From Stem Cell to Thymus–Seeding Progenitor
Hematopoietic origins, bone marrow progenitors, thymus colonization, and the developmental journey that gives rise to T cell precursors.
The Thymic Microenvironment as a Teaching Machine
Thymic architecture, cortical and medullary compartments, stromal cells, and how the thymus instructs T cell development and selection.
T Lineage Commitment: Notch and the Gatekeeping Circuit
Notch signaling, lineage specification, transcriptional gatekeeping, and the molecular circuits that commit progenitors to the T cell fate.
TCR Gene Rearrangement: How T Cells Generate Specificity
V(D)J recombination mechanics, RAG enzymes, junctional diversity, allelic exclusion, and the molecular basis of TCR uniqueness.
β–Selection and the Pre–TCR Checkpoint
The pre-TCR complex, β-selection signaling, proliferative burst, rescue from apoptosis, and the critical developmental checkpoint for thymocytes.