I know that mice are considered sexually mature around 6 weeks of age, but is there an age at which their immune systems are considered functionally mature?
I want to harvest T cells from mice to use in an adoptive transfer experiment, but I don't know if I need to wait for them to be a few weeks older first.
These works might be useful 2 .U
1. Adoptive transfer of tumor-primed, in vitro–activated, CD4 T ...
www.bloodjournal.org/content/109/11/4865.full.pdf
by LX Wang - 2007 - additional concerns about the optimal therapeutic use of. IL-2 have been raised, based ... and used at 8 to 12 weeks of age. Experimental .... Serum was collected from mice 24 hours after adoptive transfer of T cells and assayed using ... Tumor- primed T cells were harvested from LNs draining progressively growing ...
2. CD4 T cell memory derived from young naive cells functions ...
www.pnas.org/content/100/25/15053.full.pdf
by L Haynes - 2003 - Cited by 147 - Related articles
derived from CD4 T cells from aged mice responded poorly both ex ... tute until their use at 2–4 months (young) and 14–16 months ... Before adoptive transfer, effector populations were examined ... On day 3, splenocytes were harvested,.
Most people use animals aged 6-8 weeks as donors for adoptive transfer of T cells from the spleen or peripheral lymph nodes (I assume you are transferring cells from these tissues and not resident memory cells from non-lymphoid organs). One important thing to consider is that the B cell compartment is not fully mature until 8 weeks and since B cells are important providers of homeostatic signals to T cells you can see a large range in the total number and proportion of CD44+ vs. CD44- T cells in the spleen and peripheral lymph nodes from 6-8 weeks.
So, it depends on what population you will be transferring. If you will be transferring total T cells from spleen or peripheral lymph node I would wait and use cells from 8-10 week old animals so that your T cell compartment is more consistent. If you will be sorting CD62L+CD44- T cells then the timing matters less, at 6 weeks T cells will represent a larger proportion of the spleen and lymph node than at 8 weeks, so earlier time points will mean a little less sort time.
Hope this helps.
Erik is right, depends on the cell type to be transferred. But for transfer of T cells, in our experience, you can use mice ranging from 6-10 weeks with very comparable results.
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