Team Defence

Teamwork, as everyone knows, makes the dream work, and it may be key to tackling a particularly slimy health issue. Gastrointestinal worms are a threat around the world, and anyone who has been infected once may be reassured that the body develops methods to prevent a second attack. Immune cells called alternatively activated macrophages trap worm larvae in the intestine (pictured, red and green showing molecules released by the immune cells, enveloping a larva). Researchers hoping to understand the mechanism used by macrophages to tackle the worms investigated the action of various molecules produced by macrophages. They discovered that the macrophages alone weren’t enough to quell an infection, and instead the defence operation relies on additional help from products of other immune cells, T cells, and the activation of genes in the intestinal lining cells. This teamwork keeps secondary infection at bay, and could point researchers towards new treatment approaches.

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 Stefanie Westermann and colleagues
• Department of Infection Biology, University Hospital Erlangen and Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Pathogens, April 2023