The importance of dendritic cells

I just realized that something I wrote in a previous post does not make logical sense. This was not just due to a gap in my exposition but to a gap in my understanding. I now want to correct it. A good source for the correct story is a video by Ira Mellman of Genentech. I first recall some standard things about antigen presentation. In this process peptides are presented on the surface of cells with MHC molecules which are of two types I and II. MHC Class I molecules are found on essentially all cells and can present proteins coming from viruses infecting the cell concerned. MHC Class II molecules are found only on special cells called professional antigen presenting cells. These are macrophages, T cells and dendritic cells. The champions in antigen presentations are the dendritic cells and those are the ones I will be talking about here. In order for a T cell to be activated it needs two signals. The first comes through the T cell receptor interacting with the peptide-MHC complex on an APC. The second comes from CD28 on the T cell surface interacting with B7.1 and B7.2 on the APC.

Consider now an ordinary cell, not an APC, which is infected with a virus. This could, for instance be an epithelial cell infected with a influenza virus. This cell will present peptides derived from the virus with MHC Class I molecules. These can be recognized by activated T cells which can then kill the epithelial cell and put an end to the viral reproduction in that cell. The way I put it in the previous post it looked like the T cell could be activated by the antigen presented on the target cell with the help of CD28 stimulation. The problem is that the cell presenting the antigen in this case is an amateur. It has no B7.1 or B7.2 and so cannot signal through CD28. The real story is more complicated. The fact is that dendritic cells can also present antigen on MHC Class I, including peptides which are external to their own function. A possible mechanism explained in the video of Mellman (I do not know if it is certain whether this is the mechanism, or whether it is the only one) is that a cell infected by a virus is ingested by a dendritic cell by phagocytosis, so that proteins which were outside the dendritic cell are now inside and can be brought into the pathway of MHC Class I presentation. This process is known as cross presentation. Dendritic cells also have tools of the innate immune system, such as toll-like receptors, at their disposal. When they recognise the presence of a virus by these means they upregulate B7.1 and B7.2 and are then in a position to activate T cells. Note that in this case the virus will be inside the dendritic cell but not infecting it. There are viruses which use dendritic cells for their own purposes, reproducing there or hitching a lift to the lymph nodes where they can infect their favourite cells. An example is HIV. The main receptor used by this virus to enter the cells is CD4 and this is present not only on T cells but also on dendritic cells. Another interesting side issue is that dendritic cells can not only activate T cells but also influence the differentiation of these cells into various different types. The reason is that the detection instruments of the dendritic cell not only recognise that a pathogen is there but can also classify it to some extent (Mellman talks about a bar code). Based on this information the dendritic cell secretes various cytokines which influence the differentiation process. For instance they can influence whether a T-helper cell becomes of type Th1 or Th2. This is related to work which I did quite a long time ago on an ODE system modelling the interactions of T cells and macrophages. In view of what I just said it ḿight be interesting to study an inhomogeneous version of this system. The idea is to include an external input of cytokines coming from dendritic cells. In fact the unknowns in the system are not the concentrations of cytokines but the populations of cells. Thus it would be appropriate to introduce an inhomogeneous contribution into the terms describing the production of different types of cells.

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