Spontaneous somatic Pten loss contributes to functional heterogeneity of T cells

Abstract

Abstract We found that healthy mice harbor T cells with heritable low Pten expression and that monoallelic Pten loss in CD4 T cells causes a bias in their differentiation toward T follicular helper cells during acute viral infection. These results suggest that somatically induced mono- or biallelic loss of expression of signaling-related genes in T cells can impact the quality of population-level T cell responses—without conspicuous pathological sequelae such as autoimmune and inflammatory manifestations or lymphomagenesis.