immune cells tagged posts

How your life story leaves epigenetic fingerprints on your immune cells

How do nature and nurture shape our immune cells?

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen have such different responses? It largely comes down to variability in genetics (the genes you inherit) and life experience (your environmental, infection, and vaccination history).

These two influences are imprinted on our cells through small molecular alterations called epigenetic changes, which shape cell identity and function by controlling whether genes are turned “on” or “off.”

Salk Institute researchers are debuting a new epigenetic catalog that reveals the distinct effects of genetic inheritance and life experience on various types of immune cells...

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Depression linked to presence of immune cells in the brain’s protective layer

Depression linked to presence of immune cells in the brain's protective layer
CSD stress leads to increased numbers of LysM+ myeloid cells in vascular channels connecting skull BM to meninges. Credit: Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-62840-5

Immune cells released from bone marrow in the skull in response to chronic stress and adversity could play a key role in symptoms of depression and anxiety, say researchers.

The discovery—found in a study in mice—sheds light on the role that inflammation can play in mood disorders and could help in the search for new treatments, in particular for those individuals for whom current treatments are ineffective.

Around 1 billion people will be diagnosed with a mood disorder such as depression or anxiety at some point in their life...

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Your Immune Cells are what they Eat

Two T cells whose nutritional choices have changed their identity. On the left, a blue T cell prefers acetate and is active, able to continue fighting. On the right, a red T cell prefers citrate and is exhausted, no longer able to fight effectively.
Click here for a high-resolution image.
Credit: Salk Institute

Salk scientists establish novel Link between cell nutrition and identity, say targeting nutrient-dependent activity could improve immunotherapies.

The decision between scrambled eggs or an apple for breakfast probably won’t make or break your day. However, for your cells, a decision between similar microscopic nutrients could determine their entire identity...

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Study: In patients with Long COVID, Immune cells don’t follow the rules

Kailin Yin speaking with Nadia Roan in the lab
Kailin Yin (left), a postdoctoral fellow in the Roan Lab and co-first author of the study, collaborates with Gladstone Senior Investigator Nadia Roan. Their study revealed unusual activity among certain immune cells in people with long COVID.

People with long COVID have dysfunctional immune cells that show signs of chronic inflammation and faulty movement into organs, among other unusual activity, according to a new study by scientists at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF).

The team analyzed immune cells and hundreds of different immune molecules in the blood of 43 people with and without long COVID...

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