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Innate immunity

And the winner is...

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 5, pages 166–167 (2007)Cite this article

Previously, members of Jeffrey Weiser's laboratory found that in a mouse model of infection with H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae, H. influenzae quickly came to dominate owing to the clearance of S. pneumoniae by neutrophil-mediated killing. At the time, the authors concluded that a specific H. influenzae product was responsible for the activation of an S. pneumoniae specific innate immune response. In this latest work, Adam Ratner and colleagues were interested in identifying the bacterial factor responsible.

The results of in vitro biochemical analysis indicated that H. influenzae peptidoglycan was required to stimulate nuclear factor (NF)-κB signalling in a human epithelial cell line and that this stimulation was enhanced in the presence of the streptococcal pore-forming toxin pneumolysin. This led Ratner et al. to propose that the peptidoglycan could enter epithelial cells through a pneumolysin-induced pore, and this hypothesis was confirmed by further experimental work. How is the intracellular signalling cascade triggered? Co-stimulation with pneumolysin only occurred with purified peptidoglycan from Gram-negative, and not Gram-positive, bacteria. This steered Ratner et al. in the direction of the cytoplasmic receptor Nod1, which responds to a form of peptidoglycan that is mainly found in Gram-negative bacteria. The involvement of Nod1 was then confirmed experimentally.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Ratner, A. J. et al. Nod1 mediates cytoplasmic sensing of combinations of extracellular bacteria. Cell. Microbiol. 18 Jan 2007 (doi: 10.1111/j.1462-5822.2006.00878.x)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Lysenko, E. S. et al. The role of innate immune responses in the outcome of interspecies competition for colonization of mucosal surfaces. PloS Pathog. 1, e1 (2005)

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Authors
  1. Sheilagh Molloy
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Molloy, S. And the winner is.... Nat Rev Microbiol 5, 166–167 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1624

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1624

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