Emergence of NK cell progenitors and functionally competent NK cell lineage subsets in the early mouse embryo.
The earliest stages of natural killer (NK) cell development are not well characterized. In this study, we investigated in different fetal hematopoietic tissues how NK cell progenitors and their mature NK cell progeny emerge and expand during fetal development. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, that the counterpart of adult bone marrow Lin(-)CD122(+)NK1.1(-)DX5(-) NK cell progenitor (NKP) em