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NEUROIMMUNOLOGY

T cells with fragmented mitochondria frazzle the mind

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 20, page 5 (2020)Cite this article

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There is a growing appreciation of the link between the immune system and mental health. Reporting in Cell, Fan et al. have found that mice lacking CD4+ T cells are protected against stress-induced anxiety-like behaviours.

The authors next assessed differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in naive CD4+ and CD8+ T cells isolated from non-treated or ES-treated mice. They identified 128 DEGs that were specific to the ES-treated CD4+ T cells and a large number of these encoded mitochondrial proteins. Further analyses showed that ES-treated naive CD4+ T cells showed severely reduced levels of glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation and had short, fragmented (punctate) mitochondria. The authors examined the role of various neurotransmitters, hormones and arachidonic acid (AA) metabolites that have been previously linked to depression and anxiety; these experiments suggested that the AA metabolite leukotriene B4 (LTB4) is upregulated in response to stress and can promote anxiety-type behaviours by inducing mitochondrial fission in CD4+ T cells.

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References

Original article

  • Fan, K.-Q. et al. Stress-induced metabolic disorder in peripheral CD4+ T cells leads to anxiety-like behavior. Cell 179, 864–879 (2019)

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  1. Nature Reviews Immunology http://www.nature.com/nri/

    Yvonne Bordon

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  1. Yvonne Bordon
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Correspondence to Yvonne Bordon.

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Bordon, Y. T cells with fragmented mitochondria frazzle the mind. Nat Rev Immunol 20, 5 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-019-0246-0

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