An autoreactive T cell’s perception of a land of plenty

Understanding the nature of human autoantigen-specific CD4⁺ T cells is limited by the difficulty of characterizing these cells ex vivo. In this issue of Immunity, Saggau et al. use ARTE technology to profile CD4⁺ T cells specific to disease-relevant autoantigens and find that such cells develop an exhausted phenotype that includes FOXP3 expression and persist for extended periods of time.