Inflammation Explanation

Your immune system rapidly responds to protect you whenever you’re injured, or invaded by microorganisms or parasites. Inflammation is a key part of this activation, rallying the troops. It’s at the heart of both healthy protection and allergic reactions, so understanding the details is important for developing new treatments. While a group of cells called ILC2s (group 2 innate lymphoid cells, green in the slice of mouse lung pictured) were known to play an important role in inflammation, what drove them wasn’t clear. A new study now shows that they home towards specific chemokines – signalling proteins – and are guided along the way by the extracellular matrix – the structure surrounding cells (shown in pink and blue). Knowing that structural cues from this matrix, along with molecular guiding lights, steer ILC2 behaviour during inflammation helps our understanding of both allergic and disease-fighting reactions, which may eventually help us intervene when needed.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Franz Puttur and Laura Denney, and colleagues, cover image of Science Immunology, 21 June 2019
• Inflammation, Repair and Development, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London and Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, Bearsden, Glasgow, UK
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Science Immunology, June 2019