Killer Cell Dynamics

Killer Cell Dynamics

Systems biology and computational biology have recently become prominent areas of research in the biomedical community, especially in the area of cell biology. Given that much information on genes and their protein products has become available, the big question is how the individual components interact and work together, and how this determines the functioning of cells, organs, and organisms. Long before the popularity of systems biology in biomedicine, however, such approaches have been used successfully in a di?erent area of biology: population ecology. Research in the area of population dynamics - vestigated complex interactions between di?erent populations of organisms, such as the dynamics of competition and predation, food webs, community structure, as well as the epidemiology of infectious diseases. In this ?eld, t- oretical biology and mathematical modeling have become an integral part of research. Mathematical models allowed people to obtain interesting and counter-intuitive insights into how complex interactions among di?erent p- ulations can play out. Such mathematical studies not only gave rise to - teresting theoretical ideas, but also provided the basis for the design of new experimental work and de?ned major questions and directions of research. Around 1990, such population dynamic concepts, and the use of mathema- cal/computational approaches, started to be applied to the in vivo dynamics between viruses and the immune system. These interactions have many s- ilarities to ecological, epidemiological, and evolutionary principles. Consider theepidemiologicalspreadofapathogen(suchasthecommoncold)througha population of hosts.

Cellular Dynamics within the Tumor Microenvironment

The Second Life of Natural Killer (NK) Cells

Natural Killer (NK) cells are innate lymphocytes, now recognized as members of a larger family of “Innate lymphoid cells” (ILCs). Both murine and human NK cells are well characterized effector cells with cytotoxic as well as cytokine production ability which mainly react in response to microbial and cell stress stimuli, thus playing a central role in the defense against pathogen infection, in tumor surveillance and in regulating immune homeostasis. Despite these established concepts, our understanding of the complexity of NK cells, also in view of their developmental and functional relationship with other ILC subsets, is only recently emerging. This Research Topic highlights the recent advances in NK cell (and ILC) research in human and mouse from basic research to clinical applications.