Regulation and kinetics of premigrant thymocyte expansion.

Normal mature thymocytes proliferate before emigrating to the periphery, and continuous bromodeoxyuridine labeling showed that more than 30 % of fully mature thymic emigrants have replicated DNA in the 24 h before exit. The percentage of DNA-synthetizing single-positive (SP) thymocytes is transiently augmented during the postnatal period, with peaks on days 2 and 4 for CD4 and CD8 cells, respectively. Similar kinetics were observed in mouse chimeras made by transfer of normal bone marrow cells into RAG-2-deficient mice. These data show that proliferation of mature thymocytes is developmentally regulated. The proliferation peaks (on days 16 and 18 post transfer) observed in simple bone marrow chimeras were abolished when lymph node T cells were mixed with the bone marrow cell inoculum, suggesting that the peripheral pool controls the late thymic expansion. The phenotype of cycling SP thymocytes is atypical: they do not regulate activation and adhesion surface molecules like peripheral activated T cells.