Most Detailed Map Developed for Better Insight Into How Immune Cells Linked to Diseases Function

Applying new technologies to investigate thousands of genes simultaneously within immune cells, Gladstone Institutes, UC San Francisco, and Stanford School of Medicine researchers have developed the most detailed map yet of how complicated networks of genes are working together.

This new understanding of how such genes connect sheds light on the basic drivers of immune cell function and on immune diseases, as specified in a EurekAlert! report.

According to Alex Mason, MD, Ph.D., the new study's co-senior author and director of the Gladstone-UcSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, such results are helping them "flesh out a systematic network map" that can function as an instruction manual for the manner human immune cells work, and the manner they can engineer them to lead to benefit.

The research, carried out in collaboration with Jonathan Pritchard, Ph.D., professor of genetics and biology at Stanford School of Medicine, is also crucial to better understand how variations in an individual's genes are connected to their risk of autoimmune disease.

White Blood Cells Combating Diseases

Researchers know that when the T cells of an immune system, which are white blood cells that can combat infections and cancer, turn activated, levels of thousands of proteins within the cells change.

They know, too, that a lot of the proteins are interconnected such that changes in one protein's level can lead to changes in the level of another.

In Nature Genetics, scientists demonstrate connections among proteins and genes as networks looking rather like a subway on the map.

Essentially, mapping these networks is essential as they can help explain why mutations in two different immune genes might cause the same disease.

Link to Immune System

Among the entire list of genes generated by the regulators examined, the researchers discovered many genes already associated with immune diseases, including lupus, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

The new map developed by the Gladstone Institutes researchers and the whole team helped show how genetic changes linked to these diseases can occur on different genes; however, regulatory connections between genes end up having the same impact on cells.

The new map points to key groups of genes as well that drugs might target for the treatment of immune diseases.

The research suggests a central network of important genes, and when such a network is disturbed, it can increase the risk of disease in an individual.

The researchers said, when they understand how such networks and pathways are linked, it starts helping to understand key collections of genes that need to function appropriately to stop diseases of the immune system.

Related information about immunity is shown n Hay Level's YouTube video below:

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