thymus
"The thymus is like a filter," said Mark Anderson, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the UCSF Diabetes Center, and senior author of a scientific paper describing the discovery. "It is removing or pulling out autoreactive T cells. What this new study shows is if just one self-antigen is missing as the T cells go through the filter, it looks like this alone can lead to an autoimmune disease."
"The thymus is like a schoolhouse," Markert says simply, offering the analogy she uses with her patients. "When you open the doors, the students -- in the form of immature white blood cells -- are the children who run in. Eventually they graduate to be T-cells."
"The immune system has a central intelligence called the "thymus" which is a small organ located above your heart under the upper ribs. The thymus is like a library and catalogues all the past invaders, so the immune system can quickly fend off past invaders."
"However, these cells can be screened and destroyed. Young T-cells are sent to a "nursery" called a thymus, located above the heart. "The thymus is like a 'mini-me' of yourself," explains Punt. "It's a protective environment that allows the developing cells to browse a representation of your body." Ninety-five percent of these cells are killed before they can be released into the body; those that do "graduate" from the thymus will identify and destroy only pathogens-hopefully."
Someone said the thymus is like T cell school, and the little T lymphocytes are sent there where they begin in the outer cortex, and as they go through school over the years, they move on down to the deeper cortex and eventually graduate into the medulla and leave via efferent venules and lymphatic vessels. The purpose of T school is to train T cells in different vocations, such as helpers, killers, and antigen recognizing ones. Here's the the brutal part, if you don't pass the test (and you can't recognize your body's antigens), you die (95%). However, once you leave, you are skilled at whatever you have been programmed to do.
"Within the heart we work with 4 points essentially. The heart muscle is one point. Another is the thymus gland, which is the immune system. (If one measures the heart with a ECG, the thymus gland rings when the heart is in compassionate love, or laser coherence. The thymus is like a satellite-dish for coherent left ventrical magnetics of the cario-rythma's. The immune system is tuned by coherent love in that sense). Then there are the T6 and T5 nerve points in the spine. Those connect the brain with the heart through the nervous system, so that we are aware of compassionate love there. "
"From a purely medical perspective, the thymus gland is like a 'nursery' for immune cells. Undifferentiated immune cells are 'born' elsewhere in the body (eg. white bone marrow), and then spend some time in the 'thymus nursery' where they grow and develop into very specific types of immune cells with their own specific functions. Once they've 'grown up', they are sent out into the body to 'do their job'."
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