免疫学技术

After initial stimulation with antigen and exposure to the growth cytokine interleukin-2, activated T lymphocytes become sensitized to apoptosis upon antigen restimulation through the T cell receptor. This self-regulatory, restimulation-induced cell death (RICD) program ...

Programmed cell death is essential to maintaining lymphocyte homeostasis during the contraction phase of the immune response. Activated lymphocytes become susceptible to a variety of programmed cell death (PCD) stimuli over the course of a typical immune response. This chapter out ...

FOXP3+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) play an important role in controlling immune activation, maintenance of �homeostasis and the prevention of autoimmunity. Much effort has been focused in assessing their potential defects in certain human diseases and in developing potential Treg im ...

Flow cytometry is a valuable tool for the detection and characterization of proteins expressed by individual cells. Flow cytometry can be used to measure cell expression of 2 intracellular proteins that are involved in the regulation of immune homeostasis, SLAM-associated protein (S ...

Massively parallel sequencing technologies provide new opportunities to discover causal variants and �narrow down candidate genes responsible for human Mendelian disorders. Such information can in turn provide new insights into understanding the basic science behind, as we ...

Genome-wide gene expression analysis has become a very powerful routine tool for the study of distinct differentiation states. However, the examination of total populations of cells that contain high levels of heterogeneity, such as the total CD8+ T cell population during an immune respo ...

This chapter provides protocols necessary for quantifying human, mouse, and nonhuman primate signal joint T cell receptor excision circles (sjTRECs) produced during T cell receptor alpha (TCRA) gene rearrangement. These non-replicated episomal circles of DNA are generated by the r ...

The cells of the adaptive immune system, B and T lymphocytes, each generate a unique antigen receptor through V(D)J recombination of their immunoglobulin (Ig) and T-cell receptor (TCR) loci, respectively. Such rearrangements join coding elements to form a coding joint and delete the interv ...

Humans have a remarkable ability to maintain relatively constant lymphocyte numbers across many decades, from puberty to old-age, despite a multitude of infectious and other challenges and a dramatic decline in thymic output. This phenomenon, lymphocyte homeostasis, is achieved by m ...

Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that modulate the outcome of the immune response toward immunity or tolerance. There are a large variety of DC subsets according to surface phenotype, function, and tissue distribution. Murine plasmacytoid DC (p ...

Dendritic cells (DCs) are antigen-presenting cells (APCs) characterized by a unique capacity to stimulate na�ve T cells and initiate primary immune responses. Recent studies suggest that DCs are also involved in the induction of immunological tolerance in peripheral tissues under s ...

Regulatory B cells that produce IL-10 are now recognized as an important component of the immune system. We have identified a rare antigen-specific regulatory B-cell subset with a unique CD1dhiCD5+CD19hi phenotype in the spleens of wild-type mice. We call these cells B10 cells because they are ...

Peripheral αβTCR+CD3+CD4–CD8– NK1.1/CD56– double-negative (DN) Treg cells are a relatively rare subset of regulatory cells found in both humans and mice, typically comprising less than 5% of the total peripheral T-cell pool. Numerous studies have shown that DN Tregs can inhibit CD4+ and CD8+ T-c ...

Increasing evidence shows the presence and significance of CD8+ T regulatory cells (CD8+ Tregs) in both human and rodent transplant recipients, as well as in autoimmune disease models. We, hereafter, review all available data on the phenotypic and functional characterization of CD8+ Treg ...

Naturally occurring regulatory T cells (nTregs; CD4+CD25+Foxp3+) are capable of suppressing the chronic inflammation observed in a variety of different animal models of autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases, diabetes, and arthritis. A ...

Heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) is one of the three isoforms of the heme oxygenase enzyme that catabolyzes the degradation of heme into biliverdin with the production of free iron and CO. HO-1 is induced by its substrate and by other stimuli, including agents involved in oxidative stress and proinflammat ...

Autoimmune diseases develop as a result of an unbalanced adaptive immunity that targets self-antigens and causes destruction of healthy host tissues. Maintenance of peripheral immune tolerance to self- antigens is mainly mediated by dendritic cells (DCs), professional antigen- ...

Transforming growth factor (TGF- β1) is a pleiotropic cytokine, secreted by immune and nonhematopoietic cells. TGF-β is involved in many different critical processes, such as embryonal development, cellular maturation and differentiation, wound healing, and immune regulation. ...

IFN-γ was originally characterized as a proinflammatory cytokine with T helper type 1 inducing activity, but it is now clear that it also has important immunoregulatory functions. Regulatory T cells play an important role in models of autoimmunity, GVHD, and transplantation, and offer pot ...

Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) is an ancestral enzyme that, initially confined to the regulation of tryptophan availability in local tissue microenvironments, is now considered to play a wider role that extends to homeostasis and plasticity of the immune system. Thus, IDO biology h ...