Visualizing the Immune Synapse

EnABLing the immune synapse

The immune synapse (IS) forms in response to antigen presentation and T-cell receptor engagement. Following stimulation, components critical for transmitting the activation signal downstream assemble and orchestrate the events required for proper T-cell response. One key step in this process involves reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton and formation of actin-rich signaling complexes.1 This...

Spinophilin and the immune synapse

Extensive alterations in cellular organization are known to accompany the responses of sensitized T cells to target cells presenting an antigen of interest. Now, equally if not more dramatic changes are found to take place in cells presenting an antigen. With the help of a spinophilin-GFP fusion protein, Bloom et al. (Bloom, O., J.J. Unternaehrer, A. Jiang, J.-S. Shin, L. Delamarre, P. Allen, a...

Intrigue at the immune synapse.

Visualizing immune system complexity.

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) meeting Visualizing Immune System Complexity, held in January 2009, covered multiple scales, from imaging single molecules to imaging whole animals. In addition to experimental details, there was an emphasis on modeling both for data analysis and as a predictive tool to support experimental design. Imaging technologies discussed included total ...

The human natural killer cell immune synapse.

Inhibitory killer Ig-like receptors (KIR) at the surface of natural killer (NK) cells induced clustering of HLA-C at the contacting surface of target cells. In this manner, inhibitory immune synapses were formed as human NK cells surveyed target cells. At target/NK cell synapses, HLA-C/KIR distributed into rings around central patches of intercellular adhesion molecule-1/lymphocyte function-ass...