Everything's better with your MAITs

Описание: G'day MAIT!

Today we're learning about mucosal-associated invariant T cells - aka your MAIT cells. This topic is close to my heart because it's all about (hipster) T cells that aren't as commonly studied, and they were the first immune cells I ever studied.

MAIT cells are an "unconventional" type of T cell that fights off infectious pathogens. They don't recognise the derivatives of proteins (peptides), which your typical T cell does. For a long time, we didn't know what they recognised as a trigger.

In 2012, researchers discovered that MAIT cells recognise derivatives of riboflavin (vitamin B2) and folic acid (vitamin B9). Riboflavin is yellow, and Lars Kjer-Nielsen realised that it was something yellow that his MAIT cells were responding to in culture!

Armed with this information, the field is now empowered to better understand the roles of MAIT cells in health and disease. Researchers in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Advanced Molecular Imaging have driven much of this work, in the labs of Prof. David Fairlie, Prof. Dale Godfrey, and Prof. Jamie Rossjohn, in collaboration with Prof. Jim McCluskey + team.

For more science:
The discovery of vitamin B metabolites as the antigens recognised by MAIT cells - Kjer-Nielsen et al. 2012 https://www.nature.com/articles/natur...

A recent review covering what we've learned about MAIT cells since - Godfrey et al. 2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159...

Other things in this field that my colleagues in the Imaging Centre of Excellence have been up to - http://imagingcoe.org/theme-7-imaging...