Macronectes giganteus

Southern Giant Petrel

This blog is named after the Storm Petrel, Hydrobates pelagicus. It is a small bird, looking superficially like a swallow, and with a wingspan of less than 20 centimetres and a weight of about 30 grams. Looking back to my recent trip to South America, I see that the bird which made the biggest impression on me was a relative of the title species, the Southern Giant Petrel, Macronectes giganteus. It is on quite a different scale, with a wingspan of about two metres and a weight of about 5 kilograms. Thus it approaches the size of one of the smaller species of albatross. In form it looks a bit like a giant version of the Fulmar. The first ones I saw were in the harbour of Ushuaia. I then saw many more in flight during the cruise on the Beagle Channel. Before the trip I was not informed about how to distinguish Macronectes giganteus from the very similar Northern Giant Petrel, Macronectes halli. Fortunately for me, Eva was very active with her camera and took a photograph (see above) of an individual in Ushuaia which shows what I later learned to be a characteristic feature of M. giganteus, namely the fact that the tip of the bill is green. There does exist a light morph which is mainly white but we did not see any of those.

I will now mention something else which is related to the trip to South America. Someone in our group mentioned that Stefan Zweig has written a book about Magellan and since I admire Zweig’s writing I decided to read it. I remember that when I was at school we learned about Henry the Navigator and the other Portuguese explorers who found the sea route to India. At that time I had no interest in such things but now I enjoyed being reminded of this. When reading the part related to South America I had a much closer relationship to it having been in that region myself. If I could return to Punta Arenas I would look at the replica of the ship ‘Victoria’, the only ship of Magellan’s fleet which got back to Spain, with other eyes. What was the importance of Magellan’s voyage? It probably had much less economic influence than expected. It did have an important influence on ideas. The one part was that it gave a concrete demonstration that the world is round. A more subtle but fundamental point was the fact that the travellers discovered that they had lost a day although they had kept time very carefully. This led to lively discussions among the scholars in Europe.

Advertisement

T cell triggering

When reading immunology textbooks I had the feeling that one important point was not explained. The T cell receptor is almost entirely outside the cell and so when it encounters its antigen it cannot transmit this information into the cytosol the way a transmembrane receptor does. But since the activation of the cell involves the phosphorylation of the cytoplasmic tails of proteins associated to the receptor (CD3 and the -chains) the information must get through somehow. So how does this work? This process, which precedes the events relevant to the models for T cell activation I discussed here, is referred to as T cell triggering. I had an idea about how this process could work. If the T cell receptor and the coreceptor CD8 both bind to a peptide-MHC complex they are brought into proximity. As a consequence CD3 and the -chains are then close to CD8. On the other hand the kinase Lck is associated to CD8. Thus Lck is brought into proximity with the proteins of the T cell receptor complex and can phosphorylate them. I had never seen this described in detail in the literature. Now I found a review article by van der Merwe and Dushek (Nature Reviews in Immunology 11, 47) which explains this mechanism (and gives it a name, co-receptor heterodimerization) together with a number of other alternatives. It is mentioned that this mechanism alone does not suffice to explain T cell triggering since there are experiments where T cells lacking CD4 and CD8 were triggered. The authors of this paper do not commit themselves to one mechanism but instead suggest that a combination of mechanisms may be necessary.

I will describe one other mechanism which I find particularly interesting and which I already mentioned briefly in a previous post. It is called kinetic segregation and was proposed by Davis and van der Merwe. One way of imagining the state of a T cell before activation is that Lck is somehow inactive or that the phosphorylation sites relevant to activation are not accessible to it. A different picture is that of a dynamic balance between kinase and phosphatase, between Lck and CD45. Both of these enzymes are active and pushing the system in opposite directions. In an inactivated cell CD45 wins this struggle. When the TCR binds to an antigen on an antigen-presenting cell the membranes of the cells are brought together and there is no longer room for the bulky extracellular domain of CD45. Thus the phosphatase is pushed away from the TCR complex and Lck can take control. This could also represent a plausible mechanism for the function of certain artificial constructs for activating T cells, as discussed briefly here.

This mechanism may be plausible but what direct evidence is there that it really works? Some work which is very interesting in this context is due to James and Vale (Nature 487, 64). The more general basic issue is how to identify which molecules are involved in a particular biochemical process and which are not. The method used by these authors is to introduce selected molecules (including T cell receptors) into a non-immune cell and to see under what circumstances triggering can occur. Different combinations of molecules can be used in different experiments. With these techniques it is shown that the kinetic segregation mechanism can work and more is learned about the details of how it might work.