Special Article of Interest

The following interview was conducted by Signals+ Editor Di Yu, Ph.D. The Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM) recently published the study by Benjamin J. Broomfield et. al. showing early, short-term inhibition of IFN-I optimizes TSCM cell differentiation. Broomfield is a Ph.D. candidate in the Joanna Groom lab at WEHI. Highlights of [READ MORE]

The following perspective is by ICIS Member, Javier Mora, Ph.D., University of Costa Rica, Faculty of Microbiology. We welcome your comments and feedback, either to Prof. Mora (javierfrancisco.mora @ ucr.ac.cr) directly or to the ICIS Managing Director, Stephanie Flores (sflores @ cytokinesociety.org). Research in cytokines and immunology plays a pivotal [READ MORE]

The following interview was conducted by Signals+ Editor Maialen Sebastian-delaCruz, Ph.D. Connect with her on LinkedIn. A recent study by Pasquesi et al from the Chuong lab published in Cell, “Regulation of human interferon signaling by transposon exonization” showed that transposable element exonization can yield functional protein isoforms as seen for [READ MORE]

A recent study from the Mhlanga lab published in Nature Genetics, “A chromatin-regulated biphasic circuit coordinates IL-1β-mediated inflammation” sheds light on an intriguing locus harboring the proinflammatory cytokine IL1b and the anti inflammatory cytokine IL37. Their study focuses on a region between these two genes that harbors SNPs associated with altered immune responses in individuals during infection. They show that this region encodes the long noncoding RNA they name AMANZI (A MAster Noncoding RNA antagoniZing Inflammation) where the common variant RS16944 resides. [READ MORE]

Over a million studies have highlighted the central role of cytokines in immune function, yet we never had a comprehensive view of how every immune cell type responds to every cytokine. The large number of immune cell types and cytokines and complex cellular responses make it challenging.

In the recent Nature paper “Dictionary of immune responses to cytokines at single-cell resolution” (Cui et al., Nature 2023), the Immune Dictionary was created. This is a large-scale compendium of single-cell transcriptomic profiles of more than 17 immune cell types in response to each of 86 cytokines (>1,400 cytokine–cell type combinations) in mouse lymph nodes in vivo. The dictionary revealed many immune cell responses to cytokines that were previously uncharacterized. Based on this dictionary, they developed companion software, Immune Response Enrichment Analysis (IREA), that allows any researcher to assess cytokine activities, immune cell polarization, and cytokine networks from gene expression data. The dictionary generates new hypotheses for cytokine functions, illuminates pleiotropic effects of cytokines, expands our knowledge of activation states of each immune cell type, and provides a framework to deduce the roles of specific cytokines and cell–cell communication networks in any immune response. [READ MORE]