Kathleen Abadie, Nicholas A Pease, Matthew J Wither, Hao Yuan Kueh
To protect against diverse challenges, the immune system must continuously generate an arsenal of specialized cell types, each of which can mount a myriad of effector responses upon detection of potential threats. To do so, it must generate multiple differentiated cell populations with defined sizes and proportions, often from rare starting precursor cells. Here, we discuss the emerging view that inherently probabilistic mechanisms, involving rare, rate-limiting regulatory events in single cells, control fate decisions and population sizes and fractions during immune development and function...
December 2019: Current Opinion in Systems Biology