Picky Eating

Cells of the immune system gobble invading particles like Pac-Man devouring berries. Macrophages wrap their outer layer around the target and engulf them (a process called phagocytosis). They avoid accidentally gobbling healthy or harmless cells by only targeting those that have been flagged with enough antibody markers by other immune cells. To understand how macrophages assess the number of markers, a new study used a technique called DNA origami to create synthetic receptor-target systems on the surfaces of macrophages and tiny synthetic beads. They found that macrophages (green) absorbed beads with more tightly clustered labels (orange), and showed increased activity of their receptors – crucial to initiating macrophage attack. Treatments for cancers, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative diseases rely on engaging these receptors, so understanding how antibody clustering and counting affects phagocytosis could help refine therapies or even develop new approaches with synthetic receptors for targeted defence.

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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• Video from work by Nadja Kern and colleagues
• Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, June 2021