Gender bias in autoimmunity is influenced by microbiota
Gender Bias in Autoimmunity Is Influenced by Microbiota
Leonid Yurkovetskiy, Michael Burrows, Aly A. Khan, Laura Graham, Pavel Volchkov,Lev Becker,Dionysios Antonopoulos, Yoshinori Umesaki, and Alexander V. Chervonsky. Immunity.(2013)39, 400-412.
Speaker: Pei-Chi Chen (陳佩琪) Time : 15:10~16:00, April 9, 2014
Commentator: Dr. Bei-Chang Yang (楊倍昌 老師) Place: Room 601
Abstract
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease resulting in the T-cell mediated destruction of insulin-producing β cells of the pancreas. It has long been recognized that gender difference is a typical characteristic of many autoimmune diseases including T1D. Females have higher incidence in the most of diseases contributing to the influence of sex hormones. Recently, growing information illustrates that intestinal microbiota play a critical role in the susceptibility of T1D due to germ-free (GF) mice losing the sexual bias (1). However, the interval interaction between the influence of microbiota and sex hormones on T1D remains unknown. In this study, Yurkovetskiy et al. compared the microbial communities in nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice, which could spontaneous development T1D (2), of both sexes before and after puberty. They demonstrated that the microbial composition in adult male mice significantly deviated with others, which is driven by sex hormones. The authors found no unique microbiota in male mice that could protect them from T1D. However, by using gnotobiotic techniques, they found that Proteobacteria, similar to E. coli and Shigella-like strain (SECS), along with segmented filamentous bacteria (SFB) enriched in adult males put shelter from T1D. Furthermore, adult males being colonized with these protectivemicrobiomes also had higher blood testosterone levels. In order to figure out how microbe and testosterone against T1D, the authors compared the gene expression patterns of the pancreatic lymph node (PLN) in both gender of GF and specific pathogen-free (SPF) NOD mice. They confirmed that IFN-γ and IL-1β pathway participate in the protection of males against T1D. In addition, M2 macrophages and were abundant presence in PLN of SPF males. Finally, they established that SECS primed macrophages from adult males were more efficient in evoking IFN-γ from insulin-specific CD8+ T cells than adult females. In conclusion, testosterone and testosterone-specific microbes disposed gender biased protection in T1D.
References
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