Reduced thymic IL-4 impairs negative T cell selection in nonobese diabetic mice.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) develops spontaneously despite functional antigen presentation machinery in the thymus and a perceptible central tolerance process. We found that intrathymic enrichment with IL-4 fine tunes signaling through the IL-4/IL-13 heteroreceptor (HR) in early thymic progenitors (ETPs), augments negative selection of self-reactive T cells, sustains a diverse T cell repertoire devoid of clones expressing disease-associated T cell receptor (TCR) genes, and protects the nonobese diabetic (NOD) mouse from T1D. Indeed, optimal IL-4 activates STAT transcription factors to program ETP fate decision toward CD11c+CD8α+ dendritic cells (DCs) agile in negative T cell selection and clonal deletion of diabetogenic T cells.

Design of time-delayed connection parameters for inducing amplitude death in high-dimensional oscillator networks.

The present paper studies time-delayed-connection induced amplitude death in high-dimensional oscillator networks. We provide two procedures for design of a coupling strength and a transmission delay: these procedures do not depend on the topology of oscillator networks (i.e.

Topology-free design for amplitude death in time-delayed oscillators coupled by a delayed connection.

This paper deals with amplitude death in time-delayed oscillators coupled by a delayed connection with topology uncertainty. A systematic procedure without trial-and-error testing for designing connection parameters is proposed from a robust control theory viewpoint. This procedure has the following two advantages: the designed connection parameters are valid for any network topology and the procedure is valid even for long-delay oscillators.