Recent research provides new insight into the complex immune regulatory mechanisms that underlie immune tolerance. The research study published by Cell Press in the journal Immunity and available online on September 15th provides intriguing insight into the complex immune regulatory mechanisms that underlie immune tolerance.Cells called Foxp3-expressing regulatory T cells, or "Treg cells," are a subpopulation of immune cells that suppress the immune system to maintain self tolerance. These regulatory "suppressor" cells have to recognize our own cells as "self" in order to turn off the effector arm of the immune system so that it does not attack our own healthy tissues and cause an autoimmune or inflammatory disease. There has been a lot of interest in Treg cells because it has been hypothesized that these cells might be useful for treating autoimmune disease or facilitating organ transplantation. "Foxp3 is a transcription factor that is important for Treg cell function," explains senior study author, Dr. Yisong Y. Wan, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "If we are going to fully understand immune tolerance and regulation, it is critical to understand how Treg and Foxp3 function are controlled."
Dr. Wan and colleagues were interested looking at a second transcription factor, GATA-3, best known as a master regulator of another type of immune cell. "GATA-3 plays multi-faceted roles of regulating immune function in a cell-type specific fashion," says Dr. Wan. "However, whether and how GATA-3 is involved in controlling Treg function was unknown." The researchers discovered that when GATA-3 was deleted from Treg cells, mice developed a spontaneous inflammatory disorder and that Treg cells were defective in their ability to suppress the immune system. They went on to show that GATA-3 controls Foxp3 expression by binding to a regulatory region in the Foxp3 gene and that defects in both GATA-3 and Foxp3 resulted in substantially impaired Treg cells.
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