OK, so, our journal club dissolved, so I'm going to have a journal club of one. Here's a paper that I'm interested in and will read and maybe comment on so that I can remember that I read it. This post represents a total change in this "blog" to just help me keep track of papers that I am reading and like. In some kind of ideal world other people would also read it and make comments so we could have a virtual journal club.
So, if you're out there and you read this, feel free to comment about the papers and suggest other papers that you want to discuss.
Here's the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11833.abstract
Title: Quorum sensing allows T cells to discriminate between self and nonself
Authors:
- Thomas Charles Butler
- Departments of aPhysics and
- bChemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139;
- Mehran Kardar
- Departments of aPhysics and
- Arup K. Chakraborty
- cDepartments of Chemical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Biological Engineering, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; and
- dRagon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
- Abstract: T cells orchestrate pathogen-specific adaptive immune responses by identifying peptides derived from pathogenic proteins that are displayed on the surface of infected cells. Host cells also display peptide fragments from the host’s own proteins. Incorrectly identifying peptides derived from the body’s own proteome as pathogenic can result in autoimmune disease. To minimize autoreactivity, immature T cells that respond to self-peptides are deleted in the thymus by a process called negative selection. However, negative selection is imperfect, and autoreactive T cells exist in healthy individuals. To understand how autoimmunity is yet avoided, without loss of responsiveness to pathogens, we have developed a model of T-cell training and response. Our model shows that T cells reliably respond to infection and avoid autoimmunity because collective decisions made by the T-cell population, rather than the responses of individual T cells, determine biological outcomes. The theory is qualitatively consistent with experimental data and yields a criterion for thymic selection to be adequate for suppressing autoimmunity.
- I still need to figure out how this whole blogging thing works, but i think I'll just post my thoughts about the paper in the comments section after I read the paper.
