Spine-independent immunology, “PAMP” it up and more, in my Picks of the Week from RB

Another week has gone by and some very interesting molbio blog posts have been aggregated to Researchblogging.org. Every week [see my opening post on the matter], I'll select some blog posts I consider particularly interesting in the field of molecular biology [see here to get a sense of the criteria that will be used], briefly describe them and list them here for you to check out.

Note that I'm only taking into consideration the molbio-related blog posts aggregated under "Biology".

Congratulations to everyone who got their post selected.

1) Sea urchins get by without an adaptive immune system. Nevertheless, they partly compensate this deficiency by exhibiting an “unprecedented complexity of innate immune recognition receptors, relative to other animal species”. Lucas Brouwers at Thoughtomics gives some “genomic insights” into the immune system of these organisms.

2) The recognition of “pathogen-associated molecular patterns” (PAMPs) by particular plant receptors, triggers a series of defense responses with the aim of neutralizing the invading microorganism and halting the infection. Pamela Ronald at Tomorrow’s Table, presents her recent Science paper reporting the identification of a PAMP from Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae, the causal agent of rice bacterial blight disease.

3) The next article was recently selected by Francisco and I to be included in the 27th issue of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival, which we hosted and published last Friday here at MolBio Research Highlights [see Cancer Research Blog Carnival #27]. I’ll quote what we wrote about it then:

Regulatory T –cells (TReg cells) help control immune responses, playing a key role in immune homeostasis. Interestingly, it has been proposed that these cells facilitate tumors' escape from immune monitoring. Further, these TReg cells have been shown to be antigen-specific. Ian York at Mystery Rays from Outer Space takes a look at a recent article addressing an interesting question in the field: what are the tumor antigens that are driving the TRegs?

“I would have assumed that TRegs are looking at many, many tumor antigens, including both normal self antigens as well as classical tumor antigens. But a recent paper suggests, to my surprise, that this assumption is wrong. Instead, “TRegs in tumor patients were highly specific for a distinct set of only a few tumor antigens“. What’s more, eliminating TRegs cranked up the functional immune response, but only to those antigens TRegs recognized — as you’d expect, if the suppression is indeed antigen specific”

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for more MolBio Research Highlights!

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Some of the articles discussed in this week's selected posts:

Buckley KM, Terwilliger DP, & Smith LC (2008). Sequence variations in 185/333 messages from the purple sea urchin suggest posttranscriptional modifications to increase immune diversity. Journal of immunology (Baltimore, Md. : 1950), 181 (12), 8585-94 PMID: 19050278

Lee, S., Han, S., Sririyanum, M., Park, C., Seo, Y., & Ronald, P. (2009). A Type I-Secreted, Sulfated Peptide Triggers XA21-Mediated Innate Immunity Science, 326 (5954), 850-853 DOI: 10.1126/science.1173438

Bonertz, A., Weitz, J., Pietsch, D., Rahbari, N., Schlude, C., Ge, Y., Juenger, S., Vlodavsky, I., Khazaie, K., Jaeger, D., Reissfelder, C., Antolovic, D., Aigner, M., Koch, M., & Beckhove, P. (2009). Antigen-specific Tregs control T cell responses against a limited repertoire of tumor antigens in patients with colorectal carcinoma Journal of Clinical Investigation DOI: 10.1172/JCI39608