Faculty Opinions recommendation of Innate-like T cells straddle innate and adaptive immunity by altering antigen-receptor responsiveness.
Year: 2013
Type: peer-review
Abstract: The sub-classification of immunology into innate and adaptive immunity is challenged by innatelike T lymphocytes that use innate receptors to respond rapidly to stress despite expressing T cell antigen receptors, a hallmark of adaptive immunity.Explaining how such cells straddle innate and adaptive immunity, the current study shows that antigen receptor signaling, whose conventional role is to facilitate clonal T cell activation, is critical for innate-like T cell development but then is rapidly attenuated, thus accommodating the cells' innate responsiveness.These findings permitted the identification de novo of an innate-like T cell subset, and argue that T cell hyporesponsiveness, a state traditionally implicated in tolerance, may be fundamental to T cells entering the innate compartment and thereby providing lymphoid stress surveillance.In the innate phase of an immune response, myelomonocytic cells such as dendritic cells (DC) are rapidly activated by microbe-associated molecules that engage the cells' pattern recognition receptors (PRRs), particularly Toll like receptors.As a consequence, DC take up microbial materials and/or infected cells and migrate to lymphoid tissues where they present antigen to T lymphocytes, thus initiating the adaptive phase of the response.For the next several days, such lymphocytes clonally expand, differentiate, and then migrate to the affected tissues where they provide antigen-specific effector functions and commonly contribute to antigen-specific memory.Thus the biologies of myelomonocytic cells and lymphocytes largely segregate with innate and adaptive immunity, respectively 1 .While extremely powerful, this frame of reference is incomplete.In particular, there are T lymphocytes that by definition express T cell antigen receptors (TCRs), but which respond rapidly to infection or tissue dysregulation in synchrony with the innate response.This Users may view, print,
Authors: David Wiest, Francis Coffey
Institution: Fox Chase Cancer Center
Language: English
Topic: T-cell and B-cell Immunology
Subfield: Immunology
Field: Immunology and Microbiology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK
OpenAlex ID: W4213004577