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closeArticle summary published in UCSF newspaper
Posted by alexmgreer on 10 Dec 2010 at 23:01 GMT
This summary was published in the UCSF newspaper, Synapse, on December 9, 2010:
NKT cells are natural killer T-cells, or T-cells which express additional germline-encoded receptors for conserved pathogen motifs. They have been implicated in diseases ranging from allergies to cancer, but extensive studies on these cells have been limited by their rarity in human blood. In this paper, researchers isolated NKT cells from the blood of healthy donors and performed a panel of sensitive ELISPOT and multiplex bead assays to determine what types of molecules they secrete. Surprisingly, they found that NKT cells predominantly secreted chemokines, or chemical messengers that attract specific cell types. They also found significant IFN-gamma and TNF-alpha, some IL-2, IL-4, and perforin, but no significant secretion of some other cytokines previously said to be secreted by NKT cells. Furthermore, they found that mens’ NKT cells were more likely to secrete IFN and MIP-1alpha (a chemokine), which they conclude could account for some of the observed sex differences in diseases involving NKT responses.