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The mechanisms by which antigen triggers B-cell activation are incompletely understood. In this Review, Degn and Tolar discuss the different models of B-cell receptor triggering that have been proposed over the years in the light of recent insights.
Anne Spurkland is a professor of medicine, and her research interests include T cell activation and autoimmunity. She is also an avid baker of cakes that everyone can have and eat too, irrespective of allergies and dietary preferences. This latter passion propelled her into national fame as one of Norway’s most visible experts on immunity and viruses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inflammasomes are signalling machines that drive inflammation. This Review highlights the signalling biology of inflammasomes and how we can use small molecules or biologics to block pathological inflammasome signalling to treat or prevent diverse human diseases.
Oral tolerance describes how the oral administration of harmless antigens (such as dietary proteins) leads to systemic immune unresponsiveness to these antigens. Its failure can lead to conditions such as food allergies. This Review from Cerovic, Pabst and Mowat explores new insights into the mechanisms of oral tolerance, discussing how ingested antigens enter and are processed in the intestine, the roles for unique antigen-presenting cells and the induction of immunosuppressive T cell populations. The authors also examine the maintenance of tolerance to bacterial antigens in the intestine, and they discuss the mechanisms behind the failure of oral tolerance and potential clinical interventions.
Sex-specific differences in immunity are determined by genetics and by hormones. This Comment discusses first insights into the consequences of long-term sex-hormone supplementation on immunity in transgender individuals.
In this Tools of the Trade article, Mayar Allam and Ahmet Coskun describe how they combined spatial metabolomics and proteomics profiling — in a framework they call scSpaMet — to explore, at the single-cell level, how metabolic profiles vary by location and in disease.
This Review provides an overview of the immune system of the eye at steady state and in ocular disease, and it describes the links between ocular immunology and systemic disease. It highlights the intravital imaging techniques that have provided insights into immune cell morphology and dynamics in living human eyes.
Kloosterman, Erbani et al. describe a lipid-mediated, metabolic crosstalk between tumour-associated macrophages and glioblastoma cells that supports tumour growth.
This Review discusses the different mechanisms of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of infectious disease, including how antibodies can increase the pathogen load, protect bacteria from the immune system and amplify inflammation. The authors also highlight the role of autoantibodies and consider how a better understanding of ADE can be used to improve vaccines and treatments for infectious diseases.
Neuroinflammation in response to infection or chronic disease can cause non-neural symptoms such as fatigue and muscle pain. Yang et al. show that CNS-derived IL-6 directly regulates muscle physiology.
Transient depletion of the gut microbiome by antibiotics in early life reduces systemic levels of the metabolite indole-3-propionic acid, which causes long-lasting mitochondrial damage to lung epithelial cells and increases susceptibility to airway inflammation in adult mice.
In this Tools of the Trade article, Camilla Engblom and colleagues describe their elegant technique ‘Spatial VDJ’ to detect and map antigen receptor sequences in human tissue sections.
This Review covers recent advances in our understanding of CD28 co-stimulation of T cells and discusses an emerging paradigm that positions CD28 as central to the success of current and future immunotherapeutic approaches to treating cancer.
Here, Raffatellu and co-workers discuss our growing understanding of how primary bile acids (which are cholesterol-derived molecules synthesized in the liver) and secondary bile acids (which are primary bile acids that have been microbially modified) shape immune responses in health and disease, with a particular focus on bile acids and intestinal immunity.
Age-associated defects in dendritic cells can be corrected by hyperactivating adjuvants containing an oxidized phospholipid to induce effective antitumour responses in mice.
