Dietary Fat Makes Germinal Center B Cells Happy

AID-Expressing Germinal Center B Cells

Artesunate Abolishes Germinal Center B Cells and Inhibits Autoimmune Arthritis

The antimalarial drug artemisinin and its derivatives exhibit potent immunosuppressive activity in several autoimmune disease models, however the mechanisms are not well-understood. This study was designed to investigate the therapeutic effects and the underlying mechanisms of the artemisinin analog artesunate using the K/BxN mouse model of rheumatoid arthritis. The well-studied disease mechani...

Shining a Light on Germinal Center B Cells

The mechanisms of B cell selection in lymphoid tissues are poorly understood. In this issue, Victora et al. (2010) use imaging of photoactivatable green fluorescent protein to define the movements of B cells in germinal centers and provide evidence that antibody affinity maturation is driven by competition for T cell help.

Germinal center reutilization by newly activated B cells

Germinal centers (GCs) are specialized structures in which B lymphocytes undergo clonal expansion, class switch recombination, somatic hypermutation, and affinity maturation. Although these structures were previously thought to contain a limited number of isolated B cell clones, recent in vivo imaging studies revealed that they are in fact dynamic and appear to be open to their environment. We ...

BCL-6 protein is expressed in germinal-center B cells.

Structural alterations of the 5' noncoding region of the BCL-6 gene have been found in 40% of diffuse large cell lymphoma (DLCL) and 5% to 10% of follicular lymphomas (FL), suggesting that deregulated BCL-6 expression may play a role in lymphomagenesis. Nucleotide sequencing of BCL-6 cDNA predicted a protein containing six zinc-finger domains, suggesting that it may function as a transcription ...