(Bottom row, from left) Bena Chan, Kandice Levental, (Top row, from left) Daryna Sputay, Hong-Yin Wang, Ilya Levental
Backed by a new five-year $3.3 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Ilya Levental, PhD, a professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, and his collaborators aim to uncover the fundamental mechanisms by which T cells decide when to activate an immune response against infection or cancer.
The last decade has seen the discovery of a previously unknown type of organization in almost all living cells. It has been known for more than a century that lipid membranes create cellular compartments called organelles that subdivide and organize the inside of cells. In parallel, it appears that proteins, RNA and other biomolecules can organize themselves into droplet-like compartments called “condensates.” The Levental team, in collaboration with colleagues at UT Southwestern in Texas and Sick Kids Hospital at the University of Toronto, recently discovered that such condensates cooperate with lipid membranes to help the immune system decide when to attack cells that may have been infected by viruses or developed a cancer-causing mutation. Read more about this work published in the journal Science Advances.
This new project follows on these findings to study the biophysical principles and functional consequences of how condensates and membranes cooperate to help cells make the decisions. These principles are expected to inform on mechanisms of signal transduction throughout immune biology (infection-fighting T cells, antibody-producing B cells, and allergy causing mast cells), as well as other membrane signaling modules like cancer causing growth factors.
Filed Under: Research