Intraepithelial lymphocytes: lessons in immunoregulation from 'landlocked' T cells
Year of award: 2014
Grantholders
Prof Adrian Hayday
King's College London, United Kingdom
Project summary
During his award Professor Hayday will seek to update the current 'textbook' definition of the roles and actions of T cells. This research will place new emphasis on the fact that many tissues are constitutively replete with 'landlocked' T cells that Professor Hayday's laboratory has shown to respond very rapidly to tissue perturbation by infection and/or non-microbial stress such as physico-chemical insults. Pursuing the observation that the composition of the T-cell compartments differs from one anatomical site to another, Professor Hayday's hypothesis is that there are organ-specific epithelial molecules that ‘select for’ their cognate T-cell compartments. In support of this, the research group has identified a novel molecule, Skint1, expressed uniquely in thymic epithelium and in epidermal keratinocytes, that is required specifically for the development of the epidermal skin T-cell compartment. This research will test whether this is a generalisable phenomenon by tracking the identity of novel intestinal epithelial determinants of the gut T-cell repertoire. Such molecules may offer new insight into gut inflammation and interactions with the microbiome, and set a foundation for understanding T-cell compartments at other body surfaces.