Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) are a recently described family of lymphoid effector cells with important roles in immunological defense and tissue remodeling. Nature Immunology presents a series of specially commissioned articles that discuss the evolution, development, functional diversity and immunotherapeutic potential of ILCs. In collaboration with Nucleus Medical Media, Nature Immunology has also produced an animation that shows the complexity of ILC biology in the gut at steady state and during disease.
Produced with support from MedImmune
Innate lymphoid cells serve multiple roles in maintaining tissue homeostasis and responding to tissue insults and can contribute to chronic inflammatory diseases.
Targeting innate lymphoid cells, the innate counterparts of T cells, might help direct an appropriate immune response during preventive and therapeutic strategies aimed at pathogens and inflammatory pathologies
NK cells and ILC1s are developmentally distinct but share many functional similarities. Spits and colleagues describe current knowledge on the biology of these cells and the conditions under which they can be distinguished.
In this Review, Klose and Artis focus on how group 2 ILC and group 3 ILC responses are regulated and how they interact with other immune and non-immune cells to mediate their functions.
Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) arise from distinct hematopoietic progenitors. Zook & Kee discuss the transcriptional programs that direct the development of natural killer cells and various ILC subsets.
The redundant or specialized roles of innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) relative to those of T cells in vivo remain hard to delineate experimentally. Bando and Colonna review the current understanding of the specialized in vivo functions of ILCs and discuss the genetic mouse models used to assess the contributions of ILCs versus those of T cells.
The appearance of innate lymphoid cells was a major step in the evolution of vertebrate immunity. In their Perspective, Vivier et al. survey these cells in evolution and their functional inter-relationship with conventional T cells and B cells.