title: Why worms watch their hemidesmosomes and why you should, too.
abstract: Hemidesmosomes are cellular attachment structures of great importance to the epidermis. In this issue of Immunity, Zhang et al. (2015) have discovered that in addition to having structural functions, invertebrate and human hemidesmosomes are actively monitored by the cell as a novel mechanism for detecting pathogenic infection.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Comparative Immunology, Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA. Electronic address: jirazoqui@mgh.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Javier E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Irazoqui
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D023181:Antimicrobial Cationic Peptides / Q000096:biosynthesis*; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000276:immunology*; D029742:Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins / Q000378:metabolism*; D004817:Epidermis / Q000276:immunology* / Q000293:injuries*; D006801:Humans; D050791:STAT Transcription Factors / Q000378:metabolism*
chemical_list: D023181:Antimicrobial Cationic Peptides; D029742:Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins; C000597425:STA-2 protein, C elegans; D050791:STAT Transcription Factors