While neutrophils are the predominant cell type in the lungs of humans with active tuberculosis (TB), they are relatively scarce in the lungs of most strains of mice that are used to study the disease. However, similar to humans, neutrophils account for approximately 45% of CD45+ cells in the lungs of mice on a high-cholesterol (HC) diet following infection with (Mtb). We hypothesized that the susceptibility of HC mice might arise from an unrestrained feed-forward loop in which production of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) stimulates production of type I interferons by pDCs which in turn leads to the recruitment and activation of more neutrophils, and demonstrated that depleting neutrophils, depleting plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs), or blocking type I interferon signaling, improved the outcome of infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examined the associations between ambient air pollution exposure, including fine particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO), and ozone (O), with serum levels of high molecular weight (HMW) adiponectin, leptin, and soluble leptin receptors (sOB-R) in midlife women. The analysis included 1551 participants from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (median age = 52.3 years) with adipokine data from 2002 to 2003.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFToll-like receptors (TLRs) on macrophages sense microbial components and trigger the production of numerous cytokines and chemokines that mediate the inflammatory response to infection. Although many of the components required for the activation of the TLR pathway have been identified, the mechanisms that appropriately regulate the magnitude and duration of the response and ultimately restore homeostasis are less well understood. Furthermore, a growing body of work indicates that TLR signaling reciprocally interacts with other fundamental cellular processes, including lipid metabolism but only a few specific molecular links between immune signaling and the macrophage lipidome have been studied in detail.
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