title: T-cells play the classics with a different spin.
abstract: The immune system uses much of the classic machinery of cell biology, but in ways that put a different spin on organization and function. Striking recent examples include the demonstration of intraflagellar transport protein and hedgehog contributions to the immune synapse, even though immune cells lack a primary cilium that would be the typical setting for this machinery. In a second example, lymphocytes have their own subfamily of integrins, the β2 subfamily, and only integrins in this family form a stable adhesion ring using freely mobile ligands, a key feature of the immunological synapse. Finally, we showed recently that T-cells use endosomal sorting complexes required for transport (ESCRTs) at the plasma membrane to generate T-cell antigen receptor-enriched microvesicles. It is unusual for the ESCRT pathway to operate at the plasma membrane, but this may allow a novel form of cell-cell communication by providing a multivalent ligand for major histocompatibility complex-peptide complexes and perhaps other receptors on the partnering B-cell. Immune cells are thus an exciting system for novel cell biology even with classical pathways that have been studied extensively in other cell types.
authors.affiliation: Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford, Headington OX3 7FY, United Kingdom; Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016 michael.dustin@kennedy.ox.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Dustin
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001692:Biological Transport; D002923:Cilia / Q000378:metabolism; D022162:Cytoplasmic Vesicles / Q000378:metabolism; D006801:Humans; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology* / Q000821:virology