IgA protects resident commensal microbiota against competitors

This week journal Science published new study from Sarkis Mazmanian lab at Caltech describing role of IgA in providing strain-specific competitive advantage to certain resident commensal microbiota. 

His lab has been studying immunobiology of Bacteroides fragilis (B. fragilis), a gut commensal. In initial series of experiments they have compared germ-free mice mono-colonized with either wild-type B. fragilis or its mutant variants such as, Δccf, shown to modify biosynthesis of its capsular polysaccharides. They noticed that in co-housing experiments wild-type B. fragilis from one mouse could out compete mutant variant in another mouse in a horizontal transfer assay.   

Since B. fragilis polysaccharides are known to interact with host's immune system, the authors wanted to find out whether host's immune system influenced co-housing experiments. Not surprisingly, the authors found that mutant B. fragilis did not efficiently bind IgA (induced by wild-type B. fragilis) and that it in turn induced IgA repertoire that bound wild-type B. fragilis even less effectively, suggesting some kind of association between IgA and missing antigens on mutant B. fragilis.  

To verify these observations, the authors compared co-housing experiments between germ-free IgA+ and IgA-KO mice (or treated with B cell depleting antibody) mono-colonized with wild-type B. fragilis. Indeed and surprisingly this time, wild-type B. fragilis resident in IgA KO mice were easily overtaken by wild-type B. fragilis from mono-colonized wild-type mice. These results suggested that in absence of IgA wild-type B. fragilis has lost competitive advantage against wild-type B. fragilis resident in IgA+ mice.

What could these results mean in biological context: it appears that certain resident commensal microbiota benefit from interacting with IgA. The authors proposed that "during health, IgA fosters mucosal colonization of microbiota with beneficial properties....while disease states may induce (or be caused by) IgA responses to pathogens or pathobionts that disrupt healthy microbiome equilibria." This is an interpretation that does not provide clear mechanistic explanation as to how IgA response could make such discrimination at the level of antigens between which microbes to keep and which ones to eject from the host. 

posted by David Usharauli

PAMPs and DAMPs cooperate to drive vigorous adaptive immune response

This week Science published interesting article related to basic question of dendritic cell (DCs) activation and initiation of productive adaptive immune response. It showed that endogenously generated oxidized phospholipids (oxPAPC) cooperate with bacterial-derived LPS in a caspase 1/11 dependent manner to enhance viability and activation status of DCs enabling a better adaptive immune response.  

I would like to note here that title of this paper does not exactly captures the main idea behind this study. In fact, only reading the final portion of the paper one can get the sense and larger meaning of this study. I will try to explain it.   

This paper's main idea is to understand the difference between PAMPs and DAMPs with the regard of their impact on DCs. Every scientists in immunology is familiar with pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs, such as LPS) and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs, such as ATP). Nonetheless, it is still unclear what role(s), for example, DAMPs play within immune system.

To understand it, the authors focused on one particular type of DAPMs, oxidized phospholipids (oxPAPCs). oxPAPCs are found in inflammatory milieu and can reach concentrations of 10-100 μM in damaged tissues. Initially, the authors showed that unlike LPS, oxPAPCs do not signal via TLR4.

However, similar to other DAMP molecules, oxPAPCs could induce IL-1β release from LPS-primed DCs. As expected, oxPAPC-induced IL-1β release from LPS-primed DCs required inflammasome activation, since such effect were absent in DCs from ASC knockout (KO), caspase-1 KO, caspase-1/caspase-11 double KO or NLRP3 KO mice, each of which are defective for inflammasome functions.

Pyroptosis is an inflammasome-dependent cell death characterized by loss of plasma membrane integrity. Interestingly, unlike LPS or LPS+ATP combination, oxPAPC-induced inflammasomes did not promote pyroptosis. Thus oxPAPC promoted IL-1β release from living DCs.

Finally, the authors showed that mice immunization with antigen in combination with oxPAPC+LPS could improve priming of adaptive T cells in a caspase 11-dependent manner.

In summary, this study showed that DAMP molecule, oxPAPC, promotes DC viability and IL-1β release when combined with PAMP molecule, LPS. Such combination of DAMP and PAMP promoted more productive adaptive immune response.

David Usharauli