Oct. 17th (Wed)

On Wednesday, Oct. 17th, starting at Noon in CCSR 4205, Ana da S. (Fathman Lab) will present:

Dynamic imaging of chemokine-dependent CD8+ T cell help for CD8+ T cell responses

Stéphanie Hugues, Alix Scholer, Alexandre Boissonnas, Alexander Nussbaum, Christophe Combadière, Sebastian Amigorena & Luc Fetle

Nature Immunology 8, 921 - 930 (2007)

Link to article: click here

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Ana's teaser:

Interaction between cells during an immune response is one of the mechanisms that often increases the efficiency in eliminating target antigens. It is well established that CD4+ T cells are the major “helper” cell for B and CD8 T cell activation, by releasing cytokines that directly activate these cells or by increasing the ability of APCs to professionally activate other CD4+ or CD8+ T cells (ex. increasing the expression of co-stimulators molecules). Similar to CD4+ T cells, NK cells and NK T cells seem to influence the maturation of DCs and “help” CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses in vitro and in vivo. We have been mainly focused on enhancing the immune response to a specific antigen by increasing function of the “helper” cells specific to the same antigen and underscoring the effect of bystanders cells that somehow are also activated in these microenvironments. Here Hugues et al. beautifully show during the initiation of antigen-specific CD8+ T cells that naïve polyclonal CD8+ T cells also interact with the mature dendritic cells and as a result a strong CD8+ T cell antigen-specific response is elaborated. The interaction between DCs and poly-T cells seem to be dependent on CCR5 chemokine. Then, the strong CD8+ T cell response induced by mature DCs against a first peptide favored the induction of a second antigen-specific CD8+ T cell strong enough to mediate rejection of an established B16 tumor.

Oct. 10th (Wed)

On Wednesday, Oct. 10th, starting at Noon in CCSR 4205, Candace C. (McDevitt and Utz Labs) will present:

Mammalian N-Glycan Branching Protects against Innate Immune Self-Recognition and Inflammation in Autoimmune Disease Pathogenesis

Ryan S. Green, Erica L. Stone, Mari Tenno, Eero Lehtonen, Marilyn G. Farquhar and Jamey D. Marth

Immunity, Volume 27, Issue 2, Pages 308-320

Link to article: click here

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Candace's teaser:

Glycosylation plays a critical role in the regulation of numerous cellular processes, including cell adhesion, cell activation, and protein trafficking. One of the enzymes responsible for a specific glycan is alpha-mannosidase II. Interestingly, when this gene is knocked out in mice, they develop an autoimmune disease similar to lupus! In addition, the manifestation of disease is not dependent on adaptive immunity. These findings underscore the significance of sugar moieties as antigens. It also suggests that altered sugars can act as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and trigger an immune response.

Oct. 3rd (Wed)

On Wednesday, Oct. 3rd, starting at Noon in CCSR 4205, Byron E. (Nolan Lab) will present:

"A Statistician Visits the Flow Lab"

Description:

Statisticians are just now really discovering flow cytometry,
particularly phospho-flow cytometry, as a rich source of high
throughput data. In this talk, I will discuss the problem of analyzing
flow data, in the context of some experiments being done in the Nolan
lab, from a statistician's point-of-view, some pointers to the current
state-of-the-art (published and not), and a glimpse at the tools some
of us have been building to help bring more collaborators and
analytical options to the table.