Skip to main content

Liver cells and western diet - regulating inflammation

A high fat Western-style diet leads to hepatic steatosis that can progress to liver cancer. Christoph Thiele (LIMES Institute) from the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation and his colleagues used click chemistry-based metabolic tracing and microscopy, to study the interaction between Kupffer cells and hepatocytes ex vivo. The mechanism that leads to the development of steatosis upon nutritional overload is complex and only partially understood. Their study was recently published in the Journal of Cells and could show that inflammatory signals from liver cells upon western diet can lead to steatosis. The publication was shown on the cover of the journals edition in October.

Publication

Kupffer Cells Sense Free Fatty Acids and Regulate Hepatic Lipid Metabolism in High-Fat Diet and Inflammation. Diehl et al., Cells (2020) 9(10), 2258, https://doi.org/10.3390/cells9102258

Related news

Precise Konsortium

Publication Honors & Funding

Making Cancer Cells More Predictable: PRECISE Aims to Forecast Therapeutically Actionable Vulnerabilities

—Which genes and signaling pathways does a cancer cell require to survive? And which of these could serve as therapeutic targets? The pan-European initiative PRECISE aims to identify such vulnerabilities not only through labor-intensive laboratory experiments but also by predicting them using computational models. The UKB and the University of Bonn, represented by Prof. Dr. Maximilian Billmann and Prof. Dr. Jonathan Schmid-Burgk, are among the founding partners of the consortium. The scientific vision of the initiative has now been published in a commentary in Nature Genetics.
View entry
News Icon

How Skin Cells Detect Stress: Researchers Identify the Activation Site of a Key Immune Receptor

—Lipid droplets within skin cells act as a control hub for immune defense: the important immune receptor NLRP10 is activated at these tiny intracellular fat droplets in response to cellular stress. Researchers at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart and the University of Bonn have uncovered this previously unknown mechanism of immune defense. Their findings improve our understanding of inflammatory skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis and could ultimately contribute to the development of new therapeutic approaches. The study has now been published in the journal EMBO Reports.
View entry
Bild

Publication

Focus on the Guardians of the Antibody Response

—For the immune system to effectively combat pathogens, antibody responses must be precisely controlled. So-called follicular regulatory T cells (Tfr cells) play a key role in this process by limiting excessive immune responses and helping to maintain immune tolerance. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn have now developed a robust laboratory method that allows Tfr cells to be generated from precursor cells and studied in a targeted manner. The results were recently published in the journal Cellular & Molecular Immunology.
View entry

Back to the news overview