Acetylcholine-Synthesizing T Cells Relay Neural Signals in a Vagus Nerve Circuit

By M. Rosas‐Ballina, P. Olofsson, M. Ochani, S. Valdés-Ferrer, Y. Levine, Colin Reardon, M. Tusche, Valentin A. Pavlov, U. Andersson, S. Chavan and 2 more. Science, 2011

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A neural circuit that involves a specialized population of memory T cells regulates the immune response. Neural circuits regulate cytokine production to prevent potentially damaging inflammation. A prototypical vagus nerve circuit, the inflammatory reflex, inhibits tumor necrosis factor–α production in spleen by a mechanism requiring acetylcholine signaling through the α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor expressed on cytokine-producing macrophages. Nerve fibers in spleen lack the enzymatic machinery necessary for acetylcholine production; therefore, how does this neural circuit terminate in cholinergic signaling? We identified an acetylcholine-producing, memory phenotype T cell population in mice that is integral to the inflammatory reflex. These acetylcholine-producing T cells are required for inhibition of cytokine production by vagus nerve stimulation. Thus, action potentials originating in the vagus nerve regulate T cells, which in turn produce the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, required to control innate immune responses.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9854c8e6852b126ae13e79e987ca5ace6a06337

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Citations in the corpus

Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders (2018, background): “Because of its long path through the human body, it has also been described as the “wanderer nerve” (13).”
Wireless Recording in the Peripheral Nervous System with Ultrasonic Neural Dust. (2016, positive): “Recent technological advances (Boretius et al., 2010; Delivopoulos et al., 2012) and fundamental discoveries (Bhadra and Kilgore, 2005; Pavlov and Tracey, 2012; Rosas-Ballina et al., 2011) have renewed interest in implantable systems for interfacing with the peripheral nervous system.”
Sepsis: current dogma and new perspectives. (2014, background): “At the splenic nerve terminus in spleen, norepinephrine released by axons interacts with a subset of T cells that express choline acetyl transferase, the rate-limiting enzyme for the biosynthesis of acetylcholine (Rosas-Ballina et al., 2011).”