{"id":17773,"date":"2018-05-23T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/?p=17773"},"modified":"2018-05-23T01:04:17","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T00:04:17","slug":"techblog-tell-tale-lipstic-reveals-cell-cell-interactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/2018\/05\/23\/techblog-tell-tale-lipstic-reveals-cell-cell-interactions\/","title":{"rendered":"TechBlog: Tell-tale LIPSTIC reveals cell-cell interactions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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{credit}Pasqual, G. et al. Nature 553, 496\u2013500 (2018).{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

By Esther Landhuis<\/p>\n

The mammalian immune system is a sprawling network of cells, each with unique properties and functions. As discussed in my latest Technology Feature<\/a>, immunologists have developed a range of technologies to characterize those populations, from mass cytometry to single-cell DNA sequencing.<\/p>\n

But the immune system is, in fact, a system, and its members don\u2019t act alone. Immune activity depends upon cell-to-cell interaction, as when a dendritic cell cozies up to a T cell and activates it, or when a T cell run-in prompts a B cell to make antibodies. \u201cWhen those cells meet physically, that\u2019s when you start an immune response,\u201d explains Gabriel Victora<\/a>, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York.<\/p>\n

Victora and coworkers came up with a clever way to track these sorts of kiss-and-run incidents using a method they\u2019ve aptly named LIPSTIC (Labelling Immune Partnerships by SorTagging Intercellular Contacts). The system is designed such that an interaction between protein receptors on two cells \u2014 from a dish or a mouse \u2014 triggers an enzymatic reaction that tags one of the cells with a tell-tale reporter molecule. That tag \u2013 a five amino-acid peptide capped with biotin \u2013 is like lipstick on a paramour\u2019s collar, Victora says: \u201cYou know there has been an interaction if you put \u2018lipstick\u2019 on one cell and it shows up on the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a study published in January in Nature<\/em><\/a>, the Rockefeller team used the LIPSTIC approach to study interactions between dendritic cells and CD4+ helper-T cells in transgenic mice\u00a0\u2013 interactions that are critical for jumpstarting CD8+ killer-T cells in response to immunization. \u201cWithin one lymph node we could detect the dozen or so dendritic cells that were starting an immune response,\u201d Victora says.<\/p>\n

Immunologist Scott Mueller<\/a> of the University of Melbourne in Australia is also using LIPSTIC mice to determine how dendritic cells signal to CD4+ T cells \u2013 but his group is examining immune responses to viral infection. By visualising these cellular interactions in real-time with intravital microscopy, \u201cwe hope LIPSTIC will help us identify the types of interactions between cells that we cannot \u2018see\u2019 by other methods,\u201d Mueller says.<\/p>\n

At this point LIPSTIC mice are set up to analyze cell-cell interactions mediated by the pairing of CD40 and CD40L surface proteins, which are found on antigen-presenting cells and activated T cells, respectively. Victora\u2019s group plans to create additional LIPSTIC strains to analyze other receptor-ligand pairs of interest to immunologists. So far they have distributed the CD40-CD40L mice or reagents to about a dozen labs.<\/p>\n

Esther Landhuis is a freelance science journalist in the San Francisco Bay area.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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The mammalian immune system is a sprawling network of cells, each with unique properties and functions. As discussed in my latest Technology Feature, immunologists have developed a range of technologies to characterize those populations, from mass cytometry to single-cell DNA sequencing.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,200],"tags":[5579735,11487021,316,6677357,75],"class_list":["post-17773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-2","category-technology-2","tag-esther-landhuis","tag-gabriel-victora","tag-immunology","tag-techblog","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/naturejobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}