Simple physics of communication between immune cells

by Oleg Krichevsky

at Physics Colloquium

Tue, 13 Mar 2018, 15:30
Nanotechnology institute building (#51) room 15

Abstract

Immune cells communicate by exchanging cytokines to achieve a context appropriate response but the distances over which such communication happens are not known We used theoretical considerations and experimental models of immune responses in vitro and in vivo to quantify the spatial extent of cytokine communications in dense tissues Using T cell exchange of IL 2 as a model system we established that competition between cytokine diffusion and consumption generated spatial niches of high cytokine concentrations with sharp boundaries The size of these self assembled niches scaled with the density of cytokine consuming cells a parameter that gets tuned during immune responses In vivo we measured interactions on length scales of 80 120 um which resulted in a high degree of cell to cell variance in cytokine exposure Despite the complexity of the immune organs the profiles of cytokine fields both in vitro and in vivo quantitatively follow the predictions of a simple model essentially without any free parameters

Created on 07-03-2018 by Bar Lev, Yevgeny (ybarlev)
Updaded on 07-03-2018 by Bar Lev, Yevgeny (ybarlev)