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Dendritic cells and the eye: their role in the ocular immune response

Published on May 5, 2014   51 min

A selection of talks on Ophthalmology

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0:00
This is a Henry Stewart talk, and I'm John Forrester from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. My presentation is on dendritic cells in the eye and their role in the ocular immune response.
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Dendritic cells were discovered by Ralph Steinman in 1973. Steinman and Cohn reported this in the Journal of Experimental Medicine of a novel cell type in the peripheral lymphoid organs of mice. Later Ralph Steinman identified these as the most potent antigen presenting cells promoting the adaptive immune response. And he also later identified them, in fact, as having a major role in homeostasis of the immune response by promoting non-responsiveness to immune stimulation, i.e. tolerance. For this work he had international recognition in 2007 with the Lasker Award, and most recently has been awarded the Nobel Prize for this work.
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The ontogeny of dendritic cells is interesting. They arise as hematopoietic precursors as stem cells in the bone marrow. And the lineage of these, of course, is to produce macrophages and a subset of myeloid dendritic cells called, conventional dendritic cells. There is also a smaller population of CD34 myeloid precursor cells which enter the bloodstream, and these may produce a subset of cells called the plasmacytoid dendritic cells. There has been a suggestion that this other cell type, the plasmacytoid dendritic cell, may also arise from a lymphoid precursor. But it's generally believed that in fact, this is not correct, and most of this small subset of dendritic cells arises from the bone marrow. Whether or not the plasmacytoid dendritic cell has a separate lineage from the conventional dendritic cell is unclear, but they certainly do appear to have specific and selective transcription factors, such as the E2-2 transcription factor, which is, in the absence of this, the possibility that the plasmacytoid dendritic cell can revert to a conventional dendritic cell might arise.
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Dendritic cells and the eye: their role in the ocular immune response

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