Negative feedback for B cells

摘要

The discovery of a protein that regulates the production of antibody-generating B cells has implications for our understanding of how cancers of the immune system develop -- and how they might be treated. Some 40 years ago, Jacques Monod and FrancoisJacob described the role of double-negative regulatory circuits in biological systems. In their example, two enzyme pathways each yield an end-product that inhibits the activity of the other pathway (Fig. la). This circuit has the useful property that aperturbation of one of the regulators, even transiently, can push the system towards one of two cellular states. Although the model was developed by studying microbes, Monod and Jacob envisaged that such circuits would be ideally suited to the differentiation (specialization) of animal cells. Lacking the appropriate experimental tools to test this idea, they noted with some exasperation that "eventually, however, differentiation will have to be studied in differentiated cells". Now, writing in Cell, Fujita and colleagues describe a new component of an elegant double-negative circuit that regulates the differentiation of B cells into antibody-secreting plasma cells. Excitingly, their findings might bear on the study and treatment of cancer.