Autoimmune epithelitis (Sj ögren's syndrome); the impact of metabolic status of glandular epithelial cells on auto-immunogenicity.

Autoimmune epithelitis (Sjögren's syndrome); the impact of metabolic status of glandular epithelial cells on auto-immunogenicity. J Autoimmun. 2019 Sep 17;:102335 Authors: Katsiougiannis S, Tenta R, Skopouli FN Abstract It is well established that distinct cell metabolic alterations strongly contribute to the modulation of innate and adaptive immune responses. In the past decade the term immunometabolism has been introduced to describe the intracellular metabolic shifts of immune cells that lead to alterations of their functions. The pathogenesis of Sjögren's syndrome (SS), also referred to as autoimmune epithelitis, is not completely understood, but strong evidence supports the central role of the salivary glandular epithelial cells which are the target cells in the initiation of the autoimmune responses. Moreover, the altered epithelial functional phenotype, observed in the salivary gland lesion, may explain their disturbed secretory as well as immunoregulatory functions. From an immunometabolic perspective we have focused our studies on the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) of the salivary gland epithelial cells (SGEC) and the implication of its altered functions in the immunogenicity of these cells in SS. We showed that ER of SGEC in SS patients in situ is stressed and extensively dilated. Using salivary gland cell cultures, we studied in vitro the effect of ER stress on the metabolic behavior and viability of the cells. ER stress ind...
Source: Journal of Autoimmunity - Category: Allergy & Immunology Authors: Tags: J Autoimmun Source Type: research