Comments on: Starting an immune response: Find your dance partner

By: legal settlement advances

legal settlement advances — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:42:44 +0000

The illustration is perfect for this post. I’ve always been curious about how T-cells actually work. This is an amazing post.

By: Living With Crohns Disease

Living With Crohns Disease — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:50:35 +0000

Your post makes the process of immune response easy to understand from the perspective of the layman (myself) who doesn’t have a scientific background; I’ve been doing research on the immune response in relation to how it affects my Crohn’s. I have been taking a TNF-alpha inhibitor for the past few years which (as far as I understand) limits the immune system’s ability to recognize and fight inflammation. This also happens to make users more vulnerable to infection. In any case, thanks for the great mini-article!

By: iayork

iayork — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:32:48 +0000

Do you know what happens when a pathogen just isn’t detected as foreign by the dendric cells?

The signals that make a DC identify something as foreign are pretty degenerate and include generic tissue damage — that is, DCs don’t really identify foreign-ness, they identify danger-ness. Since any pathogen (pretty much by definition) is going to cause some damage, it’s hard to avoid activating DC maturation.

By: iayork

iayork — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:29:59 +0000

Thanks a lot for writing this very nice piece about our work. Keep it up!

Jeroen van Heijst

Thanks, Jeroen. Looking forward to your next findigns. Say Hi to Ton — he may not remember me, but we met a few times in Boston (I am pretty sure I was along on the pub crawl the Ploegh lab did when he left)

By: John Kelsey

John Kelsey — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:11:22 +0000

This is really interesting. Do you know what happens when a pathogen just isn’t detected as foreign by the dendric cells? It seems like this would keep your body from ever developing a strong adaptive immune response. (Macrophages and B cells can also present antigen to naive CD4 T cells, but I don’t think they can interact with a large fraction of them to find the tiny fraction that can recognize their antigen.)

If the pathogen is killing or stressing host cells, that would cause inflamation. Would that somehow make it more likely that the right naive T cell would meet with an APC presenting the right antigen? Or are there diseases where you just don’t get an adaptive immune response because the dendric cells don’t ever start it up?

By: Jeroen van Heijst

Jeroen van Heijst — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:42:27 +0000

Thanks a lot for writing this very nice piece about our work. Keep it up!

Jeroen van Heijst

By: Alejandro Montenegro-Montero

Alejandro Montenegro-Montero — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:54:14 +0000

Once again Ian, you made it to my “picks of the week” of molbio blog posts aggregated in RB.
Congratulations!
Check it here:http://bit.ly/vOF1V

-A