News & Comment

Anne Spurkland is a professor of medicine, and her research interests include T cell activation and autoimmunity. She is also an avid baker of cakes that everyone can have and eat too, irrespective of allergies and dietary preferences. This latter passion propelled her into national fame as one of Norway’s most visible experts on immunity and viruses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sex-specific differences in immunity are determined by genetics and by hormones. This Comment discusses first insights into the consequences of long-term sex-hormone supplementation on immunity in transgender individuals.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Mayar Allam and Ahmet Coskun describe how they combined spatial metabolomics and proteomics profiling — in a framework they call scSpaMet — to explore, at the single-cell level, how metabolic profiles vary by location and in disease.

Kloosterman, Erbani et al. describe a lipid-mediated, metabolic crosstalk between tumour-associated macrophages and glioblastoma cells that supports tumour growth.

Organoids generated from individuals with coeliac disease identify a role for IL-7 in disease pathogenesis.

Thierry, Baudon et al. show that non-classical monocytes are nurtured by endothelial cell expression of CSF1 throughout the whole vascular tree.

Neuroinflammation in response to infection or chronic disease can cause non-neural symptoms such as fatigue and muscle pain. Yang et al. show that CNS-derived IL-6 directly regulates muscle physiology.

Transient depletion of the gut microbiome by antibiotics in early life reduces systemic levels of the metabolite indole-3-propionic acid, which causes long-lasting mitochondrial damage to lung epithelial cells and increases susceptibility to airway inflammation in adult mice.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Camilla Engblom and colleagues describe their elegant technique ‘Spatial VDJ’ to detect and map antigen receptor sequences in human tissue sections.

The pyroptotic secretome can be beneficial in promoting tissue repair.

Age-associated defects in dendritic cells can be corrected by hyperactivating adjuvants containing an oxidized phospholipid to induce effective antitumour responses in mice.

Two papers in Nature Immunology provide a comprehensive atlas of human natural killer cells in health and in different types of cancer.

In this Comment article, organizers of the International School of Immunotherapy (Immunoschool) reflect on the experience gained from the past ten years in using online technologies for global and inclusive immunology education.

A preprint by Ngo et al. reports a new mouse model for the constitutive depletion of pDCs, showing that pDCs are dispensable for antiviral immunity.

A preprint by Stevens et al. establishes a novel mechanism by which the gut micobiota provides protection against neonatal respiratory tract infection.

Ahmed et al. report that IL-23-dependent CTLA4 expression by ILC3s restrains T cell-mediated inflammation in the intestine.

A preprint by Kaltenbach et al. shows a role for cytoskeletal control mechanisms in contributing to the tissue maintenance of mast cells.

An adoptive cellular therapy based on γδ T cells, which were engineered to secrete a tumour-targeting opsonin as well as an IL-15 superagonist, controlled tumour growth in a mouse model of patient-derived osteosarcoma.

A study by Nakayama et al. shows that heart failure causes epigenetic changes in haematopoietic stem cells that predispose to further heart disease and comorbidity.

CAR T cell therapy alleviates type 2 airway inflammation in mouse models of asthma.