Immunological Curate's Egg -- Interview with Chong Luo about defining the line between tumor elimination and autoimmunity.

Immune cells in our body not only function to ward off infections, but also eliminate unfit, and possibly cancerous cells. For this, T cells, a part of our adaptive immune response, recognize the harmful cells within the body and kill them. But sometimes they can get confused, and are unable to distinguish between harmful and normal cells. In this case, they start attacking functional organs, leading to auto-immune disorder. What helps them maintain the capacity to successfully make such distinctions??

Chong Luo and her colleagues probed this query and found that a transcription factor, Foxo1, helps define this fine line. Foxo1 expression level decreases in a certain class of Treg cells during their fight with tumor cells. However, continued expression of Foxo1 in such Treg cells impairs the response and shifts it towards autoimmunity. To understand such regulation, please listen to in to an interview with Chong.


To know more about the work, please read:
Graded Foxo1 activity in Treg cells differentiates tumour immunity from spontaneous autoimmunity
Luo et al., Nature, 2016.

Tough times don't last; 5' uORFs do! -- Interview with Shelley Starck about Cell's Stress Response Mechanism

What do you do when you feel stressed and sick. Probably try to get some rest and sleep, eat healthier and maybe go to a doctor. Did you know that individual cells in our body also come under stress! And they respond as you and I do: they decrease energetically expensive protein synthesis (rest),  but increase production of things that help them fold proteins properly, like chaperones and heat shock proteins (develop healthier mileu), and try to contact neighboring cells and immune response (doctor) to tell about their condition. But how do they achieve all these amazing tasks???

Shelley Starck, a former post-doc with Nilabh Shastri, and currently a post-doc with Peter Walter at UCSF set out to answer this exact question. She developed a highly sensitive method of detecting proteins within the cell and used the assay to find those that increase during stress. What she found can be summarized by a quote from annonymous source: "Good things can come from unexpected places".

What are these good things and how do they arrive, listen in!!!



Please read the article for more information:
Translation from the 5′ untranslated region shapes the integrated stress response
S. R. Starck et al.,Science 351, aad3867 (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aad3867