|
A collection of articles from the Nature Publishing Group.
Select the links below for full-text access.
Since the discovery that ancient molecular pathways that are involved in early embryogenesis - such as those through Notch and Wnt - are essential also for the development of the immune system, there has been intensified interest in the molecular basis of immune cell-fate decisions. Immunologists are beginning to unravel the ways in which immune-system-specific signals, such as cytokines and antigen, interact with conserved molecular pathways to determine cell fate. In addition, the immune system is an attractive model system to study the regulation of cell-fate determination by biochemical, transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms.
This Web Focus on decision making in the immune system accompanies the December 2002 issue of Nature Reviews Immunology, and it is available free online throughout December. Review and Perspective articles from Nature Reviews Immunology are included that cover the decisions that are faced by T cells during their development, how B-cell fate is regulated by antigen-receptor signals, and how B-cell development can go wrong, resulting in lymphoid malignancies, as well as recent insights into how chromatin structure affects how cell-fate decisions are made, and maintained, during haematopoiesis. We have included Highlight articles from Nature Reviews Immunology and, to complete the collection, we have added some recent research papers, reviews and comment from other journals of Nature Publishing Group.
|
