Mediators of Gut Mucosal Immunity and Inflammation

The gastrointestinal tract is continuously exposed to foreign antigens such as those derived from food and microbiota of gut. Gut flora is an important entity of human body that plays crucial role in healthy immune system and various immuno-logical disorders. Exploration of interactions between gut flora and immune system is an important area of current investigations. Cytokines and chemokines are the integral component of the adaptive and innate immune response in the gastrointestinal system. Cytokines are involved in a variety of immunological, inflammatory, and infectious diseases. Chemokines are a family of small cytokines or proteins secreted by numerous cells. The major role of chemokines is to guide the migration of particular cells. The mediators of gut mucosal immunity and inflammation are not limited to chemokines and cytokines. There are many inflammatory and anti-inflammatory molecules derived from gut mucosal endothelial cells and leucocytes. In this special issue, we report findings regarding the mediators of gut mucosal immunity and inflammation. The papers have been contributed by a number of experts in the field and include both review articles that provide an overview of the work conducted to date and original articles reporting recent developments. This special issue contains 19 papers, representing original research articles, a clinical research article, and reviews. In order to highlight the transla-tional relevance, several papers are focused on colitis mechanisms as well as clinical evidence related to inflammatory bowel diseases. Some papers offer important relationship between microbiota, probiotics, functional foods, and gut mucosal immunity and inflammation. We hope that these papers will be beneficial for clinicians and researchers in understanding of gut mucosal immunity and inflammation on health or diseases. Each of the papers in this series is briefly highlighted as follows. Y.-C. Hou et al. in " Glutamine Supplementation Attenuates Expressions of Adhesion Molecules and Chemokine Receptors on T Cells in a Murine Model of Acute Colitis " describe an animal study that investigates the effect of glu-tamine on the expression of some adhesion molecules and chemokine receptors on T cells. According to this paper, glutamine may ameliorate the inflammation of colitis via suppression of T-cell migration. H. Rajkumar et al. 's " Effect of Probiotic (VSL#3) and Omega-3 on Lipid Profile, Insulin Sensitivity, Inflammatory Markers and Gut Colonization in Overweight Adults: A Ran-domized, Controlled Trial " is a clinical study that examined the effect of VSL#3 and omega-3 on some biochemical and inflammatory markers and gut …