Repelling Repeat Offenders

Your immune system might be caught off-guard by the first sucker-punch from a bacteria or virus, but it takes steps to be better prepared for round two. It produces killer T cells to attack infected cells then remain as ‘memory cells’ to ward off future re-infection. In some areas of the body, these lingering guardians are reactivated by messengers called dendritic cells, but it wasn’t clear if these are involved when the T cells are in key organs like the lungs – a primary entry point for many infections. A new study examined T cell (blue) reactivation in the lungs of mice (lung tissue in green) with and without functioning dendritic cells (red), and found they were unexpectedly easily reactivated by other messengers, not just dendritic cells. Creating this particularly versatile immunity might be a key goal for new vaccine development, particularly in the war against COVID-19.

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 Jun Siong Low and colleagues
• NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Journal of Experimental Medicine, June 2020