Characterization and Isolation of Human T Cell Progenitors.

During their development, human T cells undergo similar genomic changes and pass through the same developmental checkpoints as developing thymocytes in the mouse. The difference between both species, however, is that some of these developmental stages are characterized by different phenotypic markers and as a result, evidence emerges that the molecular regulation of human T cell development subtly differs from the mouse [1-4]. In this chapter, we describe in detail how the different stages of human T cell development can be characterized and isolated using specific surface markers.