Pregnancy and gamma/delta T cells: Taking on the hard questions
- PDF / 1,311,270 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 68 Downloads / 129 Views
BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Pregnancy and gamma/delta T cells: Taking on the hard questions Lucia Mincheva-Nilsson* Address: Dept. Of Clinical Immunology, Umeå University, s-90185 Umeå, Sweden Email: Lucia Mincheva-Nilsson* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 02 December 2003 Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology 2003, 1:120
Received: 06 July 2003 Accepted: 02 December 2003
This article is available from: http://www.rbej.com/content/1/1/120 © 2003 Mincheva-Nilsson; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.
Introduction Considering the allograft rejection as one of the basic features of the immune system, the mammalian pregnancy is still a puzzling situation where the semiallogeneic embryo, a mating product of non-histocompatible individuals is not rejected. How are the demands of pregnancy solved in the context of the maternal immunity? How is the competent maternal immune system modulated during pregnancy? These are hard questions to answer and an intriguing challenge for immunologists to explain. Historically, the mammalian fetus has been regarded as a successful allograft, a tumor or a parasite [1,2]. Although the mechanisms that promote the survival of the conceptus are at large still unknown, it has become increasingly clear that the maternal immune tolerance towards the fetus is the result of the interactions of a jigsaw puzzle of actors – cells, serum proteins, hormones, cytokines, enzymes and neurotransmitters. The fetus is never in direct contact with uterine/maternal tissues. Instead, the contact is mediated through the placenta, a transient organ expressing preferentially paternal genes. Placental trophoblast cells come in close contact with the maternal tissues forming the so-called fetomaternal interface. There is no doubt that the maternal immune system is able to recognize and react to fetally derived antigens. However, the fetus is recognized in such a way that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) – specific, acquired arm of the maternal immunity is suppressed [3,4]. Instead, the maternal innate, first-line defense immune mechanisms are used and promoted during gestation [5,6]. The γδT cells are an important component of the innate immune system recognizing alloand/or self-antigens upon cell infection, stress or transformation. Both an effector and a regulatory role for γδT cells
in vivo are well documented. Their overall function is to maintain homeostasis in the tissues where they reside [7,8]. The constitutive presence of γδT lymphocytes at the feto-maternal interface [9-11] implies a possible role in the adaptation of the maternal immune system to the requirements of pregnancy.
The leukocyte population at the feto-maternal interface – decidua associated lymphoid tissue (DALT) The decidual associated lymphoid tissue in human early pregnancy, DALT, is show
Data Loading...
