Our gut's immune system has a tough job—it needs to peacefully handle food and helpful microbes while staying ready to fight harmful germs. Special cells called antigen-presenting cells (APCs) help guide this balance. They "show" food particles to certain immune cells called CD4+ T cells, which can then decide to either calm down (becoming pTreg cells) or gear up for action (becoming Th cells).
To learn more about how this works, researchers used a tool called LIPSTIC to find which APCs present food particles during normal, calming conditions and during inflammation. They also looked at how this balance can be thrown off during infections. They found that worm infections (helminths) upset the gut's ability to tolerate food by changing the balance of APCs. Normally, cells like cDC1s and Rorγt+ APCs help keep the peace, but helminths boosted inflammatory APCs, mostly cDC2s, which didn’t respond to food particles. This prevented the immune system from overreacting to food during infection, avoiding unnecessary allergic responses.
Canesso, M. C. C., Castro, T. B. R., Nakandakari-Higa, S., Lockhart, A., Luehr, J., Bortolatto, J., Parsa, R., Esterházy, D., Lyu, M., Liu, T.-T., Murphy, K. M., Sonnenberg, G. F., Reis, B. S., Victora, G. D., & Mucida, D. (2024). Identification of antigen-presenting cell–T cell interactions driving immune responses to food. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado5088
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